Whitby West Cliff

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Whitby West Cliff: Royal Crescent

Whitby West Cliff: Royal Crescent

For a place that has always been far out of the way, Whitby has a remarkable tenacity as a holiday resort.

Even before the early arrival of the railway, the Whitby Public Baths Company tried to promote sea-bathing at the foot of the West Pier, where baths were “replenished with the purest sea and fresh water; and are fitted up with the greatest regard both for the comfort of the valetudinarian and the gratification of the pleasurist”.

A further attempt to utilise another spring led to the building of the Victoria Spa in Bagdale in 1844. Neither of these projects was a lasting success.

A locally-sponsored Whitby Building Company issued a prospectus proposing fourteen lodging-houses on the West Cliff Fields in 1843.

The following year George Hudson, the “Railway King”, who had taken over the Whitby & Pickering Railway, purchased the West Cliff Fields, apparently to establish an interest in the town that would enable him to become its MP. (In fact, he was elected as Conservative MP for Sunderland, where he was expected to promote the Monkwearmouth Dock and the Durham and Sunderland Railway, in 1845, and the Whitby seat went to his associate, the engineer Robert Stephenson, who was returned unopposed in 1847.)

Hudson proceeded, under the auspices of the York Building Company, to construct boarding houses and hotels as a speculation.

By the time East Terrace was finished so was Hudson, discredited by his manipulation of railway finances.

Whitby achieved modest growth as a resort: its population grew from 10,989 to 12,051 between the 1851 and 1861 censuses. Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell stayed here in 1859, and accumulated background material for her novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). Other nineteenth-century authors who visited Whitby include Alfred Tennyson in 1852, Lewis Carrol in 1854, Charles Dickens in 1861 and his friend Wilkie Collins, who wrote the novel No Name (1862) while staying in the town. The Punch cartoonists John Leech and George du Maurier were visitors respectively in the 1860s and 1880s and incorporated Whitby scenes into their published work.

The West Cliff Estate passed to the self-made industrialist Sir George Elliot, Bt (1814-1893), who projected the Royal Crescent (John Dobson 1876-9) and the West Cliff Saloon and Promenade (1880, now the Spa Theatre).

One look at the architecture of the Royal Crescent and the gothic Church Square behind it (St Hilda’s parish church itself dates from 1884-6) tells the tale of over ambition and half-completion. There were simply not sufficient Mrs Gaskells to fill the place.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

St Hilda’s abbey

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Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire

Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire

The instantly recognisable ruin of Whitby Abbey on the cliff-top above the harbour is freighted with fourteen centuries of history.

Founded in AD 657 by a Northumbrian princess who became St Hilda, it was the location for the Synod of Whitby (AD 664), which established that the English church would follow Roman rather than Celtic custom.

Nevertheless, St Hilda’s Saxon abbey was designed in the Celtic manner, for parallel communities of monks and nuns, living in single cells but worshipping together.  Of the monks in her time five became bishops; two of them, like her, became saints – St John of Beverley and St Wilfrid of York.  A lay member of her community was Caedmon, traditionally regarded as the earliest English poet.

The first abbey was destroyed by the Danish invaders in AD 867 and refounded in Norman times by one of the knights who fought at Hastings, Reinfrid, who settled here as a monk and developed a Benedictine community in the 1070s.

The existing ruins represent a massive rebuilding, starting in the 1220s, continuing after a fundraising effort in 1334, followed by a distinctive break when a change from lancet windows to Decorated tracery indicates an interruption to the rebuilding programme of perhaps a hundred years between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  The final installation of the now-vanished Perpendicular west window was only completed in the fifteenth century.

Shortly after the Dissolution, in March 1540 the abbey precinct passed to Sir Richard Cholmley of Kingthorpe, near Pickering, “the great blacke knight of the North”, whose son, Francis, adapted the abbot’s lodging to make a residence. His descendant, Sir Hugh Cholmley (1632-89) aggrandised his residence Abbey House with an imposing classical Banqueting Hall wing (1672-82), the shell of which houses a modern visitor centre.

The Abbey ruins served as a waymark for mariners, but what now remains is only a vestige. Much of the church, including the tower, still stood in 1711, but the south transept collapsed in 1736, the south wall of the nave in 1762, the nave arcade in 1793, the west window the year after, the central tower on June 25th 1830 and part of the presbytery in 1839.

What was left of the west front was bombarded by the German battle cruisers Von der Tann and Derfflinger on December 16th 1914, and later reinstated, with a section of the nave arcade reassembled incongruously by the north boundary wall, after the Ministry of Works took over the site in 1920.

There are easier ways of visiting the Abbey and the nearby church of St Mary than by walking up the 199 steps from the town. There’s a discreetly hidden car-park, and a tourist bus running a half-hour service during the summer: http://www.coastalandcountry.co.uk/openTopCoach.html.

Opening times for the Abbey are at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/whitby-abbey.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Movies return to the Abbeydale

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Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

I’ve been providing historical back-up to an events organisation, Hand Of, who are devising an film weekend to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the last picture show at the Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield.

Picture House Revival: a Festival of Film takes place on Saturday July 18th and Sunday July 19th 2015, combining films, food, popcorn, ice cream, real ale and a sarsaparilla bar, a recreation of  a once much-loved temperance alternative to Sheffield’s pubs: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/picture-house-revival-a-festival-of-film-tickets-17122290231.

In fact, the event doesn’t take place on the actually anniversary (which would be July 5th) and it doesn’t reproduce the last picture show (Charles Bronson in Breakout, supported by Lords of Flatbush).

Instead, the programme includes the very first film ever shown at the Abbeydale, on December 20th 1920, a costume romance called The Call of the Road, billed as “a picture that will make history”, alongside Laurel & Hardy and more recent Yorkshire favourites, Brassed Off (Mark Harmon 1996) and Four Lions (Chris Morris 2010).

It’s a very exciting development to bring back movies to one of the few surviving Sheffield suburban cinemas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVD7_x3cb1w.

I hope it’ll be the first of many film revivals in the Abbeydale.

Stately pre-fab

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Hill Bark, Frankby, Cheshire

Hill Bark, Frankby, Cheshire

Robert Spear Hudson (1812-1884) was the man who first popularised soap powder, working from his modest shop in West Bromwich. He eventually moved his business to a factory in Bank Hall, Liverpool, and went to live in Chester.

His son Robert William Hudson (1856-1937) became extremely wealthy and sold the business to Lever Brothers in 1908.

He commissioned the distinguished local architect Edward Ould to build a Black-and-White Revival house in 1891 on a site near Bidston Hill on the Wirral.  It bears more than a passing resemblance to Little Moreton Hall, near Macclesfield – but built in reverse. It was named Bidston Grange.

Typically of its time and its style, Bidston Grange contained sumptuous glass by William Morris, and architectural bric-a-brac with antique associations – dining-room doors from a tea-clipper and a fireplace dated 1577 reputedly from “Sir Walter Raleigh’s former home”.

It was apparently the model, or at least the inspiration, for Cecelianhof, the Potsdam residence of the Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, built c1911 and subsequently the site of the signing of the Potsdam Agreement of 1945.

In 1921 Bidston Court was sold to Sir Ernest Royden (1873-1960), one of a dynasty of shipbuilders and shipowners.

Because Lady Royden disliked the way its setting was encroached by housing [http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/218605] the 1891 structure was dismantled and re-erected a property she had inherited five miles away at Frankby.

There it replaced a house of 1868-70, originally built for Septimus Ledward JP, which took its name ‘Hillbark’ from a stone barn that had stood for several centuries.

The Roydens’ transplanted residence became known as Hill Bark.

The original site at Vyner Road South, Bidston, is now a public garden.

When Sir Ernest Royden died in 1960, Hill Bark was purchased by Hoylake Urban District Council and converted into a residential home for the elderly.

It was sold in 1999 for £300,000 and converted first into a catering-facility specialising in weddings, opened in 2000, but using only the ground-floor rooms. In 2002 it was restored as a luxurious 19-bedroom five-star boutique hotel: http://www.hillbarkhotel.co.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Leasowe Castle

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Leasowe Castle, Cheshire

Leasowe Castle, Cheshire

One of the most distinctive places to stay on the Wirral is Leasowe Castle, which was in fact never a castle, though it has been put to many uses in its four-hundred-year history.

Leasowe Castle is identified with the “New Hall” built by Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby in 1593, the year of his accession to his title, possibly as a stand from which to watch horse-racing on the flat shore.

A datestone bearing the Stanleys’ triskelion, the three-legged symbol of the Manx kingdom, is now in the Williamson Museum & Art Gallery in Birkenhead.

Ferdinando, Earl of Derby’s original structure was an octagonal tower with walls three feet thick, to which were later added four square towers, possibly by William, 6th Earl, in the early seventeenth century.

By the late seventeenth century the building was derelict and known locally as “Mockbeggar Hall” and for much of the eighteenth century it was used as a farmhouse.

In 1802 was sold to Margaret Boole, “the kind old lady of Leasowe Castle”, which she had made a refuge for the victims of shipwrecks and wreckers on the Wirral coast.

She set up Dannet’s Rocket Apparatus on the shore in an attempt to prevent shipwrecks and the pernicious activities of the local wreckers, who would show false lights in an attempt to lure vessels ashore.

Margaret Boole died in 1826 as a result of a carriage accident, and the Castle passed to her daughter and heir, Mary Anne, the wife of Col Edward Cust.

Colonel Cust converted the Castle to a hotel with the intention of establishing a resort in the grounds, and when this ambitious project failed in 1843 he turned back it into a residence which he kept until his death.

Edward Cust added most of the features of the building as it now stands –

  • the perimeter wall and entrance gateway
  • the Battle Staircase, its 84 wrought-iron balusters each carrying a painted nameplate commemorating a British victory
  • the dining room panelled with wood ostensibly taken in 1839 from the original Star Chamber in the Exchequer Buildings of the Palace of Westminster
  • the supposedly haunted library fitted with oak timbers from the submerged forest at Moels

– and possibly the oak Canute’s Chair, now lost, which stood above the high-water line, carved with the motto “Sea come not hither nor wet the sole of my foot”.

One of Col Edward Cust’s successors sold the Castle in 1891 to the Leasowe Castle Hotel company.

The original Star Chamber panels are reported to have been sold in the contents sale which took place on September 16th-20th 1895: the existing ones may be reproductions.

In 1910 the Castle was bought by the Trustees of the Railway Convalescent Home and, apart from an interlude during the First World War when it housed German prisoners of war, it remained in their hands until 1970.

In 1982 it returned to hotel use: http://www.leasowecastle.com.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Museum Mile – the Guggenheim Museum

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Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Solomon R Guggenheim (1861-1949) was a younger son of the mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim (1828-1905) and the founder of the Yukon Gold Company. He collected modern art and displayed his paintings at his apartment at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, until the collection became so large that it grew into the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which opened in 1939.

In 1943 he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s only New York building, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum [http://www.guggenheim.org], which eventually opened in 1959 – after the deaths of both the founder and the architect – at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street in the midst of the city’s Museum Mile.

There it sits, looking as if it’s landed from outer space, a deliberate challenge to the rectilinear patterns of the streets and the buildings around it.

Frank Lloyd Wright would rather have built it elsewhere – not in New York City, which he disliked – and chose the Fifth Avenue site because of its proximity to Central Park.

The spiral shape reflects a nautilus shell, and the divisions of the display areas echo the membranes of citrus fruit.

Like most Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, it looks remarkable yet has turned out to be remarkably difficult to maintain, and it’s undergone a series of repairs and renovations.

Though its aesthetic appeal is a matter of taste, there is no denying the impact of this sensuous, swirling structure.

Its practicality can best be appreciated by taking the ovoid lift to the top and following the gently graded spiral ramp, which inevitably dictates the order of viewing exhibits, round and round the central space.

The peculiarities of its display-space have irritated some artists and, indeed, some curators. It’s impossible to hang a flat painting on a concave wall, and difficult to place a rectilinear canvas on a sloping floor.

Others regard it as an exceptional context for showing artworks. Indeed, one of its most memorable exhibitions, Frank Gehry’s The Art of the Motorcycle (1998), was built around an assemblage of 114 historic motor-bikes.

The Guggenheim’s eccentricities do not suit all types of art by any means, but the building is a consummate work of art in its own right.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

Museum Mile – the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

You could quite easily spend an entire rainy week in New York working your way round the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This vast treasure house consists of almost 250 rooms filling something like twenty-one acres of floor-space, roughly two million square feet, and only about a quarter of the permanent collection can be exhibited at one time.

The core of the museum was built by the co-designer of Central Park, Calvert Vaux, in collaboration with Jacob Wrey Mould in 1880 to house a collection that had already outgrown two previous buildings on other sites in ten years: long since buried amid later accretions, the original museum has since been extended on at least eight occasions.

Among the most memorable experiences the Museum can offer are the 1978 Sackler Wing which houses the entire Egyptian Temple of Dendur and the Astor Court which contains a reproduction of a Ming dynasty Chinese garden.

A hint of the wealth of paintings in the Museum’s collection can be found simply by checking the Wikipedia entry’s ‘Selections from the permanent collection of paintings’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art.

Whenever you become footsore or simply overstimulated by this great world museum, the consummate life-enhancing experience is the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, where the memorable views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan compete with the exhibits.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

Museum Mile – the Frick Collection

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Frick Collection, New York City

Frick Collection, New York City

There’s a stretch of New York’s Fifth Avenue, bordering Central Park, that’s known as Museum Mile. It’s actually slightly longer than a mile and boasts, in its official definition between 82nd to 105th Streets, nine major city museums, with another couple further along.

My personal favourite is actually just outside Museum Mile, at 70th Street.

When I first visited New York City courtesy of Freddy Laker’s Skytrain in 1981, I knew only two people who’d ever been there. One was my friend Bill, who had lugged his motorbike aboard a tramp steamer and ridden across the USA both ways, and he made me promise that while I was in the Big Apple I’d go and sit by the fountain in the Frick Collection.

This I duly did, and every time I’ve returned to the city I make a point, if possible, of sending Bill a postcard from the Frick.

Built in Louis XVI style by Carrer & Hastings (1912-14), this was the town-house of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the unlikeable and notably unpopular chairman of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. After the death of Frick’s widow in 1931 the building was adapted as a museum which opened in 1935.

Of all the city’s many museums and galleries, the Frick is intimate and reassuringly calm. The Fountain Court created by John Russell Pope in the 1930s refurbishment must be among the most congenial places to sit and relax in the whole of New York City.

The core collection reflects Henry Clay Frick’s personal taste. I remember standing in front of a fireplace, looking at the Holbein of Sir Thomas More on one side and the same painter’s portrait of More’s nemesis, Thomas Cromwell, on the other.

There’s nowhere in the world quite like the Frick.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

Leeds’ latest tram

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Leeds 602

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Leeds 602

For years now, a sleek modern-looking single-deck railcar has remained indoors at the National Tramway Museum at Crich.

Leeds 602 is Leeds’ latest tram – not the last to run but the last to be built – one of a pair of prototype railcars designed for an abortive scheme for subways under the city centre.

The only trams ever built by the Leeds coachbuilder Charles H Roe, these two Leeds railcars came into operation in 1953, Coronation year, hence their unusual and very stylish purple and cream livery.

The sister car, 601, had identical bodywork but used a conventional tramway electrical control system; 602 was more revolutionary, using VAMBAC (Variable Automatic Multi-notch Breaking And Acceleration), the same control gear that caused problems in Blackpool because their VAMBAC trams had alarming acceleration and a voracious appetite for current.

Both Leeds trams had little use over about four years, and both were sold for preservation. 601 was so badly vandalised at a site in Leeds that it had to be scrapped. 602 was purchased for £150, largely at the instigation of a Leeds enthusiast, Dr Granville King, and taken to Crich.

After Dr King died in 2013 – his funeral took place at Crich [http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Tributes-paid-tramway-attraction-fan-Granville/story-19968551-detail/story.html] and his ashes are scattered there – the Museum Board learnt that he had left £250,000 specifically to restore 602 to running condition.

This placed the Board in a difficult position, because the professional conservators’ advice was to keep 602 as it was, an apparently unaltered example of 1950s engineering.

To the fury of many tram enthusiasts the Board rejected the bequest and 602 seems destined to sit in an exhibition hall for the foreseeable future.

The ensuing correspondence has been vehement and vituperative – http://www.britishtramsonline.co.uk/news/?p=7932 – and the public-relations consequences of turning down a £250,000 legacy will no doubt reverberate for years.

There are lessons to be learned. It seems a good idea when making a conditional bequest to check whether it will be acceptable. It’s inadvisable to look a gift horse in the mouth.

And it’s easier to maintain integrity when it’s possible to be consistent. The National Tramway Museum has an unassailable reputation for restoring both operable trams – Southampton 45 and Sheffield 510 – and barely recognisable relics – London United 159 and Sheffield 74.

Many contributors to the tram-enthusiast blogs can’t understand why it’s in order to restore London County Council 1 “Bluebird” which will otherwise literally disintegrate, and not to do the same with Leeds 602 when the necessary cash is offered on a plate.

As one of the contributors pointed out, “Where some modifications to materials have to be made for safety reasons, then the original parts should be conserved in a properly catalogued archive where it is possible for more people to learn from them than while hidden in the vehicle’s internal workings.”

I’ve no credentials as a tram enthusiast. I’m grateful to be able to look at 602, but I’d much prefer to ride on it.

After all, it’s hardly Stephenson’s Rocket.

An update on this saga is at http://www.britishtramsonline.co.uk/news/?p=12743#comment-3225397.

Bluebird no 1

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: London 1

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: London 1

The next major restoration project at the National Tramway Museum is London County Council 1, the prototype for a new fleet of double-deck tramcars that was launched at a tramway-industry conference in 1932. LCC tramways were amalgamated into London Transport the following year, and a policy of tram-replacement meant that the design never went into production.

Nicknamed “Bluebird” because of its distinctive original livery, it has been red for most of its life – first as London Transport no 1 and – after it was sold to Leeds Corporation in 1951 – as Leeds 301.

Because of its historic significance it was donated to the then Museum of British Transport at Clapham in 1957 and eventually found its way to Crich.

There it remained a static exhibit, mouldering quietly, until its condition became a matter of concern and controversy. The materials used in its construction – aluminium in contact with steel – have caused galvanic corrosion, which if unchecked would cause it to disintegrate. Should it be brought back to working order, which would involve dismantling and the inevitable replacement of mechanical parts and bodywork? Or should it be treated as a relic, too important to be touched?

The resolution has been to go for full restoration, with a forensic, meticulously documented survey of its condition to ensure that historically valuable parts that can’t be reused are kept for future reference.

It will be a particularly arduous restoration of a unique vehicle: one commentator remarked, “Little is known about how this tram was constructed so it will literally be a case of learning more about the tram by taking it apart.”

It has also proved to be exceptionally expensive.  The London County Council Tramways Trust has apparently raised around half a million pounds to put this magnificent vehicle back in service for the first time since 1957.

I’m more than happy to see another magnificent, significant historic vehicle brought back to life.