When I was around six or seven years old, circa 1954, my mother would collect me from Huntsman’s Gardens Schools, in the depths of Sheffield’s industrial east end, and call round at Attercliffe Library for her weekly fix of books to read. Though she had left school at fourteen, she was an omnivorous reader.
I have a clear memory that, while she browsed, I would make a beeline for the bottom shelf of the music section, dig out a score of Handel’s Messiah and stare in wonderment at the multiple staves of the ‘Halleluiah Chorus’, amazed to see how much music could be going on at one instant.
How I reached this I’ve no idea. Somehow I must have known that the ‘Halleluiah Chorus’ was part of Messiah and that it had been written by George Frideric Handel, but the piece is actually buried at the end of Part II and so isn’t easy for a little kid to find.
Attercliffe Library, built in 1894, still exists, an elegant Jacobethan building next door to the older Attercliffe Baths of 1879. It was designed by Charles Wilke, about whom next to nothing is known.
For nearly a hundred years it provided knowledge and entertainment to Attercliffe workers and their families and then, when the houses eventually came down, it closed in 1986.
Over years of driving into
East Anglia I have only associated Felixstowe
with processions of container trucks hammering down the A14.
When I stayed at the Woodbridge Station Guest House I took the train to Ipswich and then on to Felixstowe to a happy surprise. “Felix” is, after all, Latin for “happy”.
The mouth of the River
Orwell has been strategically important, both for trade and defence, since
Roman times at least, and grew markedly after the arrival of the railway in
1877 and the opening of the port in 1886.
The passenger train-service now terminates at the latest of the town’s three stations, Felixstowe Town (1898), which was built in response to an upturn in tourism after the 1891 visit of Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein (1858-1921), Queen Victoria’s great-niece and the wife of Germany’s last Kaiser, Wilhelm II.
The walk down Hamilton
Road, now partly pedestrianised, leads to a clifftop view of the Pier (1905; rebuilt 2017) [http://www.felixstowe-pier.co.uk], with the cranes of the distant docks to the right, and the promenade to the left.
The seafront is dotted with
opulent former hotels, of which the Felix
Hotel (1903) is the most prominent.
This is where Princess Victoria and her family stayed in 1901 and,
coincidentally, where Wallis Simpson took rooms while her divorce took place in
nearby Ipswich in 1936. (This was the
occasion of the legendary American newspaper headline “KING’S MOLL RENO’D IN
WOLSEY’S HOME TOWN.”) The Felix closed
in 1952 and became the headquarters of the fertiliser company Fisons Ltd for
thirty years. It is now, predictably,
converted to apartments.
Landguard Fort
[http://www.landguard.com] introduces visitors to the long history of
Felixstowe’s defences. This was the
location of the last opposed invasion of England in 1677, and four of the
original seven Martello towers in the town survive.
I had a typical seaside
lunch, fish and chips at Fish Dish [http://www.myfishdish.co.uk]. When I told the guy behind the till that the
place reminded me of Whitby he smiled and said he’d trained and worked at
Whitby for thirteen years before setting up in Essex.
The pleasures of Felixstowe
are simple. On a sunny day you can sit
on a promenade bench and watch vast container ships, loaded to capacity, making
their way out of the port at surprising speed.
And, because Ipswich is a
significant rail hub, you can visit Felixstowe from far afield without using a
car.
Dale Dike Dam, South Yorkshire: marker ‘Centre Line Old Bank’Dale Dike Dam, South Yorkshire: memorial
Sheffield has a poor track-record for civic monuments.
Apart from the statue of King Edward VII standing in recently
spruced-up surroundings in Fitzalan Square, most of the other monuments that
once graced the centre have been shipped off to suburban parks or, in the case
of the Crimea Monument, dismantled: https://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/sheffields-missing-crimean-war-monument.
Indeed, until recently there was no monument of any significance
to those who lost their lives in the most dramatic incident in the history of
Sheffield, the Great Sheffield Flood of
1864.
The Sheffield Waterworks Company, desperately trying to keep up
with accelerating demand from the rapidly growing steel industry and the
expanding population, devised a scheme to capture the waters of the Loxley
Valley, north-west of the town.
The first of three planned reservoirs, Dale Dike, was begun in 1859 and, after its alignment had been altered to avoid unexpected disturbed strata, it was completed and filled by early 1864.
No sooner had the waters reached within two feet of the lip of the
dam than cracks appeared and, within a day, the dam collapsed at 11.30pm on March
11th 1864, sending 700 million gallons of water down the Loxley Valley at a
speed of around 18 miles an hour. At
least 250 people were killed, including 27 whose bodies were never
recovered. Around 800 houses were
destroyed or abandoned and well over 4,000 flooded.
There was no firm agreement over the cause of the disaster, at
least partly because of the Coroner’s intemperate handling of the inquest. Among the possible contributory causes were –
slippage of unstable strata beneath the embankment
poor construction of the embankment surrounding the clay core
inadequate thickness of the clay core
settlement or undue pressure leading to fracture around the outlet
pipes and consequent leakage
The jury’s verdict was that “there has not been that engineering skill and that attention to the construction of the works, which their magnitude and importance demanded…” and they went on to propose that “the Legislature ought to take such action as will result in a governmental inspection of all works of this character; and, that such inspection should be frequent, sufficient and regular…”
Such legislation was eventually passed – the Reservoirs (Safety
Provisions) Act (1930).
Although designed in the same way as the failed dam, Agden Dam was
resumed and its 629,000,000-gallon reservoir completed in 1869. Further upstream, the Strines Reservoir
(513,000,000 gallons) was finished in 1871.
The new Dale Dyke Dam, a quarter of a mile upstream from the site
of the original, was completed in 1875, though the reservoir was not brought
fully into use until 1887. It holds
446,000,000 gallons.
The final Loxley valley reservoir, Damflask, which holds
1,158,000,000 gallons, initially intended for use as compensation water, was
constructed in the late 1870s but because of leakage through the strata at one
side was not fully operational until a wing-trench was completed in 1896.
For many years the only physical memento of the original Dale Dyke
Dam was a marker stone inscribed “CLOB” – Centre Line Old Bank – indicating the
alignment of the 1864 dam.
For the 150th anniversary of the disaster, the Bradfield Historical Society cleared a trail around the reservoir and put up a memorial to the victims of the flood.
The Station Guest House at Woodbridge – https://woodbridgestationguesthouse.co.uk
– is an excellent example of practical reuse of a
potentially redundant station building. The station itself continues to
operate as the first stop out of Ipswich on the line to Lowestoft and the
building houses a high-quality café, the three-bedroom guest house, a florist’s
shop and a taxi office.
The station was built for
the former East Suffolk Railway and opened in 1859. A footbridge provides access both to the
Ipswich-bound platform and also to the banks of the nearby River Deben.
I had a comfortable family room with a double bed and a single bed, with an en-suite which allowed me to watch people walking over the footbridge without them seeing me at my ablutions. It’s a corner room, so from one window I could watch the trains arrive and depart over the level crossing and from the other I could watch the boats riding the tide on the river.
Breakfast is served
promptly at 9.00am at a reserved table in the café and the service is
admirable. The only minor downside is that car-parking is £3.00 a day
maximum and you have to feed the meter before the guy with the hi-vis jacket
books you. The notice by the machine warns that photographs may be taken,
which I read as a threat.
There’s really no reason to
bring a car to stay at the Station Guest House.
There’s a perfectly good train service that links with London and East
Coast services via Ipswich.
Carla, the delightful lady
who welcomed me to the Station Guest House , reeled off a list of places to
have dinner as the café closes at 3.00pm. For most of my stay, however, I
happily picnicked each night with more than enough tea and coffee and the sound
of the trains through the open window.
Woodbridge itself is an
attractive town. Beside the river is the
Woodbridge Tide Mill, one of two
remaining tidal watermills that are restored to working order and producing
wholemeal flour for sale [https://woodbridgetidemill.org.uk]
and on the opposite bank is the National
Trust Sutton Hoo Visitor Centre [https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sutton-hoo], marking the site of the enormously significant
Anglo-Saxon ship burial, excavated in 1939.
Lister Drive Baths, Liverpool: first-class swimming pool (2019)
Some conversions of old buildings to new uses are an uneasy
compromise – cinemas converted into apartment blocks, places of worship adapted
as pubs.
The former Lister
Drive Baths in Liverpool is an example of reuse as pure genius.
Lister Drive, connecting Newsham Park with Green Lane, was laid out in the late 1890s and furnished with a series of Corporation buildings, all of them overseen but not all designed by the City Surveyor, Thomas Shelmerdine.
At the west end of the Drive, nearest the Park, was the tramway electricity generating station (c1902, demolished), to the east Green Lane Council School (1907, demolished) and Thomas Shelmerdine’s Green Lane Carnegie Library (1904-05, currently being restored), and in the centre the Lister Drive Baths, designed by the Corporation Baths Engineer, W R Court (1901-04) on the basis of “sketch designs” by Shelmerdine.
The Baths is an essay in terracotta, inside and out, in what
is described as a “free English Renaissance” style. The tiles and bricks were supplied by
Pilkington & Company, including fish and leaf designs by Charles Francis
Annesley Voysey (1857-1941). The layout
provided first- and second-class plunge baths for men (60ft × 30ft and 75ft ×
35ft respectively), first-, second- and third-class private baths for men, and
women’s private baths. Women were
allowed access to the first-class men’s bath on certain days.
Hot water for the baths was supplied by the nearby
electricity generating station.
The Baths were closed because of bomb damage during the
Second World War, and were repaired and reopened in August 1949. They finally closed in 1987 and were
appropriately adapted as a welcoming pet shop, with the first-class pool given
over to koi carp.
During opening hours the public are welcome to look around, without any obligation to buy so much as a packet of bird-seed. And if you have a pet, it seems the Lister Fisheries & Pet Centre has everything they might need or want: http://www.listerpetcentre.co.uk/index.html.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.
Hiroshima, Japan: City Transportation Museum, Chōrakuji
I had a couple of hours to spare in my last afternoon in
Hiroshima, so I took to the Astram,
opened in 1994, a people-mover built to connect with the major sporting arena
up in the hills, Edion Stadium Hiroshima.
The people-mover is remarkable, over eleven miles long,
running underground beneath the central area and then mounting a continuous
viaduct that never seems to touch the ground.
I’m not convinced about this rubber-tyred concrete technology: it’s distinctly bumpy compared with rail and
the infrastructure seems to be bulky and intrusive.
The route is up a steep-sided valley that reminded me of
Halifax, or Hebden Bridge, in which every piece of flat land is built on, with
low-rise housing, high-rise towers and the associated suburban public and
commercial development.
I was interested to see the Hiroshima hinterland, and I took
as my destination the transportation museum at Chōrakuji, two-thirds of the way along the route.
The Hiroshima City Transportation Museum [http://www.vehicle.city.hiroshima.jp/VEHICLE_HP/Contents/01_home/0104_English/ehome.html], a five-minute walk from the Astram station, is in an expensive-looking modern building, and was not what I expected. There are only two full-size vehicles in the whole place – a sports car and one of the atom-bomb trams, identical to the two I’d seen on the streets but painted in a different livery.
A whole floor is given to an eclectic display of a couple of
thousand models of trains, cars, ships and aeroplanes, with very perfunctory
labelling in Japanese and English. I had
a go at driving a train simulator but couldn’t get on with it.
Upstairs was a two-storey hall, filled with a gigantic
working model of a not-far-into-the-future city to demonstrate as many modes of
public transport as possible – not only trains and cars and ships and aircraft
but helicopters, monorails, travellators, even a fairground.
So there, under one roof, you can examine past, present and
future transportation, most of it in miniature, some of it in motion.
On my second day in Hiroshima I bought a slightly more
expensive streetcar-and-ferry pass, and in the morning travelled down tram
route 2 all the way to the terminus, Miyajima-guchi. This was another transport surprise, because
after a dozen stops in street-tramway mode, à
la Leeds or Sheffield circa 1950,
the streetcar turns a corner into a complicated little station and then becomes
a fully-fledged railway, like the Fleetwood tramroad but far longer, with
houses backing on to the track, stations at regular intervals and endless
automatic full-barrier crossings. A
road-sign outside Miyajima-guchi station shows the distance back to Hiroshima
as 23km, but the rail line is actually 16.1km.
The ferry takes about fifteen minutes to cross a stretch of
water to a wonderfully picturesque island, Miyajima,
with the steep, deeply forested mountains that you see in Japanese prints, and
on the foreshore the Itsukushima Shrine,
ostensibly dating back to the twelfth century but apparently last replaced in
1875. Tourists flock to photograph
themselves with their backs to this monument;
schoolchildren are brought in droves to line up for class
photographs. There are sacred deer, in
Shinto belief the messengers of the gods, which are regularly fed by the
tourists, despite notices forbidding it.
The Hiroden public-transport operator, through its
subsidiary Hiroshima Tourism Promoting [Hiroshima
Kankō Kaihatsu] runs a ropeway up the sacred Mount Misen. The upper
terminus is a thirty-minute hike to the actual summit at 1,755 feet but you
can’t have everything: the ropeway takes
out 945 feet of that climb and every little helps.
The island has much else to offer, several temples and a
pagoda, and spectacular displays of blossom in spring and maple leaves in
autumn. I could cheerfully return for a
Japanese holiday on Miyajima, knowing that a day-visit to Hiroshima city is
easily practical.
Hiroshima Electric Tramway, Japan: “Atomic bomb” tram 652
To make the most of my two days in Hiroshima, my first mission was to get my bearings. Armed with a day pass for the streetcars, I walked to the nearest route and rode to the railway station to find my way to the Sightseeing Loop Bus. These are red single-deckers with vestigial commentary offering two overlapping routes which I did in succession. My Japan Rail Pass gave me this for free: the driver simply photographed the pass with a digital camera, but more recently the service has become entirely free [https://www.hiroshima-navi.or.jp/en/information/loopbus].
The red bus tour orientation enabled me to use streetcars
for the rest of my day’s travels. The
streetcar system is a full-on transport facility, not by any means a heritage operation,
though it’s billed as “the moving streetcar museum” because it runs up-to-date
low-floor vehicles alongside earlier generations right back to two of the trams
that survived the atom bomb, 651 and 652:
http://train.sakura.ne.jp/train/hiroden/carphoto/index.html.
Indeed, the streetcar company is proud
that they had three of these trams back on the road three days after the bomb.
The tram and bus operator is the Hiroshima Electric Railway
Co Ltd, known from the Japanese Hiroshima
Dentetsu Kabushiki-gaisha as Hiroden for short.
I made use of my streetcar pass to explore the city. I deliberately took a tram to the end of the
line at Hiroshima Port, simply to
gauge how big the city is. (It has a
population of around a million, equivalent to Birmingham.) The ferry terminal provides passenger access
to various outlying islands, and indicates that the harbour facility is
enormous. Otherwise there’s little to
detain anyone.
The journey back in the rush hour was a farce. The older streetcars have seats parallel to
the windows, so you sit with your back to the view, gazing at the midriffs of
standing passengers. It’s impossible to
see where you are; the in-car signage is
in Japanese with no indication of the stop-numbers and there was no PA system
(which in Japan might be bilingual Japanese/English). I eventually got off at a point which fitted
with my mental map and took a tram in the opposite direction back to the point
where I could walk back to my hotel. I
sense that the only way to deal with the Hiroshima rush-hour is to travel to
the end of the line and bag the seat beside the driver.
Rush-hour is rarely fun anywhere in the world. Hiroshima is a tram city, and though the
sightseeing loop bus is useful for orientation, there’s no better way of
getting around outside rush-hours than with a day pass on the streetcars.
My generation were the first to grow up in the shadow of
nuclear war, and images of the devastation of the Japanese city Hiroshima were
printed on our youthful imaginations.
It’s perhaps understandable, though regrettable, that
Hiroshima, destroyed by atomic bomb on August 6th 1945, has always gained
attention in precedence over the port-city of Nagaski, which was attacked four
days later.
When I was offered to opportunity to attend a conference in
Tokyo in 2016, I asked for my return date to be deferred so that I could see
something of Japan, and my first priority outside the capital was to travel to
Hiroshima, now once again a thriving city with a present-day population of over
a million.
The Atomic Bomb Dome
[Genbaku Dōmu], which I’ve always
wanted to see, is surprisingly modest, a three-storey exhibition hall and
office building that survived because it was almost directly below the
hypocentre, so that the walls withstood the downward blast. Everyone in the building was, of course,
vaporised.
What was a densely populated suburb is now a formally
landscaped, very beautiful park, with a river channel running through it. There are more individual memorials than it’s
comfortable to take in. I was
particularly taken by the Peace Bell,
a modernist cupola containing a Japanese bell which you’re invited to ring, and
which resonates for well over a minute, proclaiming the hope of peace in the
world.
I could hardly get near the Children’s Peace Monument, which commemorates Sadasko Sasaki, a
schoolgirl survivor who succumbed to leukaemia, attributed to the bomb, at the
age of twelve in 1955. She was convinced
that if she made a thousand origami cranes she would be cured. In fact, she carried on making more than a
thousand until she was too weak to continue, and the paper crane has become a
symbol of the prayer for peace. This and
other monuments in the park are constantly embellished with coloured strings of
cranes, some of them sent from all over the world.
The Peace Memorial
Museum [http://hpmmuseum.jp/?lang=eng]
disappointed me, entirely because it was impossibly crowded. The exhibits and the information are, as you
would expect, difficult to take in by their nature, but the scrum of school
parties and adult tourists, many with children and pushchairs, some taking
flash photographs, made me wish I could be there on a rainy November Monday
afternoon to appreciate more sensitively the power of the place and the memory
of the victims.
I gather the Museum is to be greatly expanded, which might resolve this difficulty. It’s a place that should be openly accessible to present and future generations, comparable to the better-managed 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City.
It’s often forgotten that when James Brindley (1716-1772)
surveyed his canal to carry coal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s mines at
Worsley, he originally planned to build its terminus in Salford.
This was the route authorised by the first Bridgewater Canal
Act of 1759.
Almost immediately, Brindley made the radical decision to
take the canal across the River Irwell so that it could terminate at
Castlefield in Manchester.
This scheme made it practical to build an extension, longer
than the original main line, to run parallel to the Mersey & Irwell
Navigation towards Liverpool, but it depended on bridging the River Irwell with
an aqueduct, carrying canal barges above
an existing waterway, at Barton-upon-Irwell.
Despite the scepticism of other engineers and
parliamentarians, and even though the first ingress of water nearly caused the
collapse of one of the three arches, Brindley’s Barton Aqueduct proved to be practical when it opened in 1761, and it became the wonder of the age.
All the great aqueducts the canal age stem from this modest-looking structure.
Its replacement, the hydraulic Barton Swing Aqueduct (1894), is remarkable in its own way.
It was designed by the Ship Canal’s engineer, Edward Leader
Williams (1828-1910), the designer of the Anderton Boat Lift (1875), and was
constructed by the ironfounders Andrew Handyside & Co of Derby.
Watertight gates block the canal and the tank that carries
boats, as the bridge swings to lie parallel with the Ship Canal so that
ocean-going vessels can pass.
The adjacent Barton
Road Swing Bridge works in tandem with the aqueduct, and both are
controlled from the four-storey brick valve house on the man-made island in the
middle of the Ship Canal.
At one time the single-carriageway Barton road bridge was
practically part of the Manchester ring road, and the traffic delays became
notorious after the Second World War.
The traffic jams were relieved but not eliminated by the
construction of the M60 Barton High
Level Bridge (1960) to the west of the swing bridges.
Standing on the canal bank or the swing road bridge at
Barton is a reminder of how far engineering has developed since the uneducated
millwright James Brindley ventured to bridge the river with a canal in the
middle of the eighteenth century.
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