The flying tram-rail

Leave a Reply
Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

On the evening of Thursday December 12th 1940 my Auntie Edna, then a teenager, put on her dancing shoes and caught a tram into Sheffield city-centre to go dancing.  No sooner had she got there than the sirens sounded and she spent twelve terrifying hours in a shelter as the shops and public buildings above were bombed and burnt down.

The following morning she tramped the three miles back to the family home in the East End to be greeted by her father with “And where the bloody hell have you been?”

He had, of course, spent the night watching the red sky over the city-centre knowing his daughter was out there in great danger.

The city of Bristol suffered a succession of air-raids, one of which, on Good Friday 1941, permanently put the tram system out of use by severing the main power cable at Counterslip Bridge.  The story goes that the last car to Kingswood was pushed by its passengers until it could freewheel to the depot.

I thought of Granddad panicking about his daughter’s safety when I found a fearsome memento of the Bristol Blitz, and of Bristol’s tramway, in the churchyard of the grand parish church of St Mary Redcliffe, round the corner from Temple Meads Station.

A sizeable length of tramrail remains embedded among the graves where it landed as it flew over the houses from an adjacent road.

You wouldn’t have wanted to be about when debris as heavy as several yards of tramrail was flying around.

No wonder Granddad was so upset, and so relieved to see his daughter bedraggled but in one piece after the Luftwaffe bombed Sheffield.

The Bombed Out Church

1 Reply
St Luke’s Church, Liverpool (1979)

St Luke’s Church, Liverpool (1979)

When I first knew Liverpool in the late 1960s, St Luke’s Church was a blackened, bombed-out ruin with trees growing inside the roofless nave and the clock dials stopped at 3.36am, showing the time on the morning of May 7th 1941 when the flames up the tower brought down the floors, the roof and most of the bells.

I didn’t realise at the time that this poignant memento of the Liverpool blitz was under threat, because Graeme Shankland’s Liverpool City Plan of 1965 proposed an inner ring-road aligned directly on the nave, and would have left the tower as a forlorn waymark.

Shankland’s scheme didn’t happen:  the existing bleak dual carriageways behind the Three Graces and eastwards towards the M62 give an idea of how the city would have been carved up if it had gone ahead.

In the time that St Luke’s stood abandoned people became attached to it as a reminder of what the city suffered in the Second World War.

However, if you leave a ruin as a ruin, sooner or later it falls down.

In fact, St Luke’s is a significant building.  Built by Liverpool Corporation as a parish church that would also serve for civic services, it was designed by the Senior Surveyors, John Foster Snr and his son and successor, John Foster Jnr, perhaps with the help of a shadowy assistant, “Mr Edwards”, in an elaborate version of what modern architectural historians call the “Commissioners’ Gothic” style.

Built on a sloping site which accentuates the height of the 133-foot tower, it has rich architectural detail, with octagonal buttresses rising to elaborate turrets and ogee mouldings over the belfry windows.  It opened for services in 1832, and the scale of the nave and aisles made it a useful space for concerts until the completion of the Philharmonic Hall (1849) and St George’s Hall (1854).

St Luke’s became known as the “Doctors’ Church” because of the large number of medical practitioners and their families from Rodney Street who worshipped there.

The stonework has been cleaned to show the fine carving, but nothing of the interior survives.  In the roofless tower, the cast-iron bell-frame – believed to be the earliest to be built (1828) – remains in situ, and a clock similar to the lost original was found and installed.

The churchyard, which has never been used for burials, was developed as a garden, and now contains Aemonn O’Docherty’s Irish Famine Memorial (1998).

The ruins and the grounds of St Luke’s were opened up by the Liverpool arts and events organisation Urban Strawberry Lunch, and are now cared for by the group Bombed Out Church, which runs events, exhibitions and open-air film shows and concerts to keep alive the city’s blitz memorial.

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

The last bomb site

1 Reply

Former Swan Inn, National Picture Theatre and Jubb’s furniture store, Beverley Road, Hull

Former Swan Inn, National Picture Theatre and Jubb’s furniture store, Beverley Road, Hull

Hull’s Beverley Road is rich in architectural interest, and includes an unprepossessing but astonishing survival:  sandwiched between the former furniture shop of E C Jubb and the former Swan Hotel is the gaunt façade of the former National Picture Theatre, built in 1914 and bombed in an air-raid on the night of March 17th-18th 1941.

The film that night was, ironically, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.  When the sirens sounded the audience of 150 left the auditorium and gathered in the foyer but couldn’t leave the building because of the intensity of the raid.

A direct hit destroyed the screen end of the cinema and brought down the roof, but the front of the building survived and no-one was injured.

The rubble was subsequently cleared away, leaving the façade and the standing remains of the foyer, staircases and the rear of the balcony.  Somehow, the ruins were left untouched from 1941 to the present day.

This shell, “as hit”, is now the only surviving civilian bomb-site remaining from the Second World War:  http://ncww2mt.freewebspace.com/cgi-bin/i/images/hdm-fb-26.7.05.jpg.  Of the other fourteen bomb-sites, twelve are ecclesiastical and one lies within a naval dockyard.

When local people, particularly the customers of the Swan Hotel next door, began to appreciate its rarity they formed the National Civilian WW2 Memorial Trust, and persuaded English Heritage to award the ruin Grade II listing.

With support from English Heritage, Hull City Council is considering making a Compulsory Purchase Order to retain the National Picture Theatre as an intact memento of the nightmare of enemy action, not only in Hull but across Britain:  http://ncww2mt.freewebspace.com/index.html.

Trafalgar Street Church

Leave a Reply

Trafalgar Street Church, Beverley Road, Hull

Trafalgar Street Church, Beverley Road, Hull

When I was a student in Hull in the late 1960s, I regularly trundled up and down Beverley Road on the top deck of a bus without taking the slightest notice of the streetscape.

Now, fifty years later, I’ve walked the length of Beverley Road from town to the Cottingham Road junction to check what notable buildings survived.

One interesting relic is the Trafalgar Street Church, a curious turn-of-the-century Baptist church with distinctive free Gothic façades of flint with red-brick dressings and a quirky corner tower with an octagonal turret, designed by the London architect George Baines (1852-1934).

Opened in 1906, it served its original congregation until 1938 and then became nondenominational.  It had closed by 2002 and the adjacent Sunday School has since been converted to flats.

The interior of the chapel, though decayed by water ingress, appears to be intact – a light, interesting galleried space with transepts, aisles and a fake hammer-beam roof:  http://www.trafalgar-church.co.uk/Photographs.

The Friends of Trafalgar Street Church group is campaigning to convert the church to a productive modern use but does not own the building:  http://www.trafalgar-church.co.uk.

As a Grade II listed building and a landmark within the Beverley Road Conservation Area, a gateway into the city centre, the Trafalgar Street Church deserves a future.

Sheffield Central

Leave a Reply

Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Sheffield’s self-confessed mapaholic, Mike Spick, does a very fine presentation about mapping Sheffield.  It was strongly recommended to me by a friend, and I caught it at a Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group meeting in January 2016.

One map in particular that Mike showed alerted me to a piece of Sheffield history I’d never heard of before.

A plan of c1890-1895 showed a scheme to link Sheffield’s two competing railways, the Midland and what was then the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, at a combined triangular station to be called Sheffield Central.

The gradients apparently would have been demanding, because the MS&L (from 1896 renamed the Great Central Railway) runs on a viaduct at the point where the Midland burrows beneath it in a cutting.

Clearly the project came to nothing and as far as I know is not mentioned in published histories, but its chronology explains why the Midland Railway brought in their house architect Charles Trubshaw to double the size of their station in 1905, while the Great Central built a new frontage to Sheffield Victoria in 1908.

The site of the unbuilt triangular station is now occupied by the delta junction which connects the three lines of Sheffield Supertram at Park Square.

Terracotta city: Green Lane Library & Baths

Leave a Reply

Green Lane Masjid and Community Centre, Small Heath, Birmingham

Green Lane Masjid and Community Centre, Small Heath, Birmingham

Of all the terracotta public buildings in Birmingham designed by William Martin of Martin & Chamberlain, one of the most dramatic compositions is the Green Lane Library & Baths, Small Heath, with a circular clock-tower at the apex of a sharply triangular site between Green Lane and Little Green Lane.

The library was opened 1894, and after the well was sunk in 1896 the first- and second-class swimming pools and public baths were begun in 1897 and opened 1901.

The swimming baths were bombed on October 18th 1940 and rebuilt in 1951.

The building closed in 1977 and was sold for £24,000 two years later for conversion to a mosque and community centre.  The community had previously worshipped in two terraced houses is Alum Rock;  the spacious facilities at Green Lane enabled them to expand to provide worship space with ablution facilities, a mortuary, a reference library and a community hall.

The Green Lane Masjid and Community Centre was completed in 2008, and the Green Lane Independent Boys School opened in 1911:  http://www.greenlanemasjid.org/about-us/history.aspx.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Terracotta city: Nechells Baths

1 Reply

Nechells Baths, Birmingham

Nechells Baths, Birmingham

Nechells, on the north-east fringe of central Birmingham, was a gritty place of canals, railway lines and gas-works and power stations, for which the terracotta public buildings of the “Civic Gospel” were much-needed amenities.  Bloomsbury Library had been built in 1892 with a police- and fire-station attached, but no swimming baths.

Baths were vital in working-class districts, not so much as leisure centres but as an indispensable aid to personal hygiene.  Slipper baths were a desirable alternative to the tin bath in front of the fire.

Though the site was purchased in 1903, construction of Arthur Harrison’s design began only in 1908, and the swimming bath and male and female private baths were opened in 1910. 

For many years it provided winter assembly facilities when the bath was boarded over. 

It closed in 1996 and became badly vandalised. 

It was handed over to the Birmingham Foundation (now the Birmingham & Black Country Community Foundation) and with the financial support of Advantage West Midlands, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the European Regional Development Fund it was restored as a multi-purpose community facility providing a crèche and nursery facilities, an internet café, office accommodation for not-for-profit community organisations, a youth club, community bingo and a thriving dance group.

The restoration used recycled demolition materials to provide a new entrance portico with an extension faced in natural copper and a rotunda of masonry, brick and glass.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Closely-guarded secret

2 Replies
Box Tunnel, Great Western Railway, Wiltshire

Box Tunnel, Great Western Railway, Wiltshire

Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Box Tunnel is celebrated for its engineering significance – and for its entertaining legends.

Driven through the unfriendly Cotswold geology, at the time of construction it was, at 3,212 yards, the longest railway tunnel in the world, though several earlier canal tunnels were longer.

Furthermore, Brunel designed it on a gradient of 1 in 100, descending from east to west.  Contemporary critics warned against “the concussion of the atmosphere and the vibration” arising from trains labouring up the grade, and predicted a downhill runaway would leave the tunnel at a speed of 120mph, a calculation which failed to account for friction and air-resistance:  Brunel’s more realistic computation arrived at a speed of 56mph.

The tunnel was ready for the first train to run from London to Bristol on June 30th 1841.  The west portal, visible from the main road through the village of Box, is an elaborate classical composition.  Its arch is far taller than necessary, and the rock-hewn bore funnels to the conventional loading-gauge within.  The plainer east portal at Corsham lies in a cutting.

One of the enduring stories about Box Tunnel is that Brunel aligned it so that the sunrise would shine through the dead-straight bore on the morning of his birthday, April 9th.  This is within the range of practical possibility, apparently, but difficult in the circumstances to check.

The underground Bath stone quarries which lie under Box Hill to the north of Brunel’s railway tunnel have excited considerable speculation.

Ridge Quarry was used as an ammunition store in the First World War until 1922, and became Central Ammunition Depot Corsham in 1934-6.  It was used by the RAF until 1955 and then by the Army until 1964.

A much larger complex comprising some 2¼ million square feet of storage space, based on the former Eastlays, Monkton Farleigh and Tunnel Quarries, was adapted in the 1930s as a huge subterranean ammunition store, Central Ammunition Depot Monkton Farleigh.

This wartime facility was supplied by a narrow-gauge railway and inclines connected to a GWR siding at Shockerwick, just outside the east portal of the main-line tunnel.

In 1940 the Bristol Aircraft Company’s experimental section moved into Spring Quarry, and the Ministry of Aircraft Production built an underground aircraft-engine production plant to avoid disruption from bomb-attacks on Bristol.  Despite a reputed final cost of £20 million, the facility allegedly took four years to build, operated for eighteen months up to the end of the War and produced 523 out of a wartime total of 100,932 Bristol aircraft engines.

RAF Box, later known as RAF Rudloe Manor, was established above ground and within a subterranean area known as Brown’s Quarry to act as an important regional headquarters during and after the Second World War.

In the Cold War era part of Spring Quarry was used to build the Central Government War Headquarters, a 240-acre alternative seat for national government in the event of nuclear attack or civil disruption.  Capable of accommodating four thousand staff for up to three months, it drew its water-supply from an underground lake and was equipped with generators and temperature-control, the second largest telephone-exchange in Britain and a BBC broadcasting studio.

Peter Laurie’s early study of covert government infrastructure, Beneath the City Streets:  A Private Inquiry into the Nuclear Preoccupations of Government (Allen Lane 1970;  revised Panther 1979), pointed out that trains running through Box Tunnel audibly traversed a junction, which – he speculated – would allow trains, including the Royal Train from Slough, to disappear into the safety of an underground citadel.

The actual evacuation procedure apparently involved concentrating staff at Kensington (Olympia) station and transporting them by rail via North Pole Junction and Westbury to Warminster, from where they would be conveyed by road to Corsham.

The Prime Minister and his immediate entourage would be the last to arrive, by helicopter directly to Corsham.

The headquarters was apparently abandoned in 2004.

A further facility, the Corsham Computer Centre was established in the former Hudswell Quarry in the 1980s, and remains part of the Bristol Bath Total Facilities Management Project:  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/11/280247.html.

According to internet sources which may not be up to date, Eastlays Quarry is now a bonded warehouse:  http://www.nettleden.com/venues/eastlays-quarry.   Monkton Farleigh Quarry was sold in 1976 and briefly opened as a museum in 1984:  http://www.theurbanexplorer.co.uk/farleigh-down-tunnel-wiltshire.  Ridge Quarry was resold to the original owners in 1975.

In fact, the most accessible information on this former state secret is to be found on the Government website:  https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/324883/Corsham_Tunnel_version1.pdf.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 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.

Bell-mouth spillway

2 Replies
Bell-mouth spillway, Ladybower Reservoir, Derbyshire

Bell-mouth spillway, Ladybower Reservoir, Derbyshire

One of the best free shows in the Peak District National Park, in rainy seasons, is the bell-mouth spillway beside the A6013 road that skirts Ladybower Reservoir, the biggest of the three Derbyshire Derwent valley reservoirs.

The original Derwent Valley water scheme of 1899 envisaged six reservoirs but only two of these, Derwent and Howden, were built.

The engineer, Edward Sandeman, pointed out that repositioning the Derwent Dam slightly further upstream would dispense with the need for the top dam, Ronksley. Geological problems in the tributary Ashop valley led to the abandonment of the other three dams, Hagglee, Ashopton and Bamford, which were superseded by a single huge reservoir, contained by a dam at the next available nick-point, Yorkshire Bridge.

This great dam, named Ladybower after a local farm, was begun in 1935.  It drowned two villages, Derwent and Ashopton, and was so badly needed that construction continued without interruption throughout the Second World War.

It was opened by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on September 25th 1945. Designed by G H Hill & Sons of Manchester, and constructed of earth around a clay core by Richard Baillie & Sons, East Lothian, the dam is 416 yards across.  Its trench and embankment required 100,000 tons of concrete, 1,000,000 tons of earth and 100,000 tons of puddled clay.

Unlike its predecessors at Derwent and Howden, which spill their excess water over the stone sill of the dam, at Ladybower the dam has a clay core and a grassed slope downstream.

The overflow water is directed into two bell-mouth spillways, which from above look for all the world like plugholes, but are actually shaped like ear-trumpets, 80 feet across at the rim, tapering to a 15-foot pipe that emerges at the foot of the embankment.

This footage brings the still picture to life:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg-mjoLm1Jo.  In-depth explorations can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqXGM_L7Zp0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5BVsk9o9hw.

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.

A different Fifth Avenue

Leave a Reply

Former Soviet Embassy, Havana, Cuba

Former Soviet Embassy, Havana, Cuba

I simply don’t get brutalist architecture.  I’m sometimes embarrassed, as a paid-up member, when the Twentieth Century Society campaigns for a concrete edifice that I’d cheerfully blow up, but there are uncompromising, exciting, post-war concrete buildings that I would miss if they were removed.

Perhaps the most startling post-war building I’ve ever seen is the Russian Embassy in Havana (originally, of course, the Soviet Embassy).

Designed by Aleksandr Rochegov and built between 1978 and 1987, it stands on the Quinta Avenida, or Fifth Avenue, in the Miramar district which was, before the Cuban Revolution, the prestigious residential district of the nation’s capital.

There is very little information on the web about this epic piece of concrete, with its gaunt tower protruding above the trees.

It’s described as constructivist, rather than brutalist, in style.  To me, in my ignorance, the distinction is academic, though students of modern architecture would recognise the two as entirely different concepts.

The most coherent example of constructivism I’ve come across, but not yet seen, is the Shukhov Tower in Moscow (1920-1922):  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shukhov_Tower.

Yet the Russian Embassy in Havana is so unremittingly ugly that I rather like it.

And I’d be sorry to see it go, because it represents a layer in the palimpsest of Cuban architecture, along with the Spanish and American buildings that populate the island representing the stages in its history.