Gothic survival: St John’s Church, Briggate, Leeds

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St John the Evangelist Church, Briggate, Leeds

St John the Evangelist Church, Briggate, Leeds

The term “Gothic Revival” is familiar to anyone with the remotest interest in architecture, but “Gothic Survival” is much rarer.

There’s a splendid example of a Gothic church built after the Reformation but still in the medieval tradition at the end of Leeds’ main shopping street, Briggate, opposite the Grand Theatre.

It was needed because in the early seventeenth century Leeds was expanding as a centre for the wool trade, and the parish church, St Peter’s, became overcrowded.

The church of St John the Evangelist was paid for by Alderman John Harrison (1579–1656), a cloth-merchant and much-loved philanthropist who also provided a market cross, alms-houses and land and a building for the Leeds Grammar School. Leeds’ first historian, Ralph Thoresby, notes that Harrison fitted his doors and wainscots with holes “for the free passage of cats”.

When St John’s was built, 1632-4, it was fully a hundred years since church-building had been commonplace, and the folk-memory of the old masons had faded. The window-tracery is quirky, as if improvised, and the layout is odd: what might be the south aisle is the same size as the nave.

This double nave, with a central arcade, was practical because the preacher was positioned at the centre of the north wall. An elaborate screen separates the chancel area, where communion was celebrated “as in times past”.

St John’s looks superficially like a medieval church, but the panelling, the pulpit and the screens are distinctively Jacobean, with strapwork and obelisks, and the Royal Arms are those of James I & VI, who had died in 1625.

In its layout and decoration, this was a church that followed the ritualistic principles of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud (1573–1645).

The religious turmoil of the time flared up on the consecration day, September 21st 1634. In the morning John Cosin, chaplain to Richard Neile, Archbishop of York, preached a sermon in line with Laud’s principles. The same afternoon, the Puritan first Vicar of the new church, Robert Todd, in his sermon, vehemently attacked Neile’s views and was promptly suspended by the Archbishop. It took a year for John Harrison and Sir Arthur Ingram of Temple Newsam to secure Todd’s reinstatement.

In the early nineteenth century there was a strong possibility St John’s would have been demolished. The south porch was in fact taken down, and the tower was rebuilt in 1838.

Its rarity was recognised by the young architect, Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912). He enlisted the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878), and between them they persuaded the Church authorities in 1865 that it would be cheaper to restore than to rebuild.

The congregation has long since disappeared, and this Grade-I listed church is now maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust.

It’s open over lunchtime from Tuesday to Saturday, and is a welcome haven of calm in the midst of the busy city centre: http://www.visitchurches.org.uk/Ourchurches/Completelistofchurches/Church-of-St-John-the-Evangelist-Leeds-West-Yorkshire.

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

Sitwell Sitwell

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Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire: east wing

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire: east wing

The Sitwell family have lived at and owned Renishaw since the 1301. Of the owners who built and embellished Renishaw Hall, the one who aggrandised the house most was Sir Sitwell Sitwell.

The male line of the Sitwells ended with the death of the second of two bachelors in 1777 and the property, said to be worth half a million pounds, passed to a nephew in the female line, the lively, musical Francis Hurt of Mount Pleasant, Sheffield, who took the surname Sitwell.

It happened that Francis had already named his heir Sitwell Hurt, so that he duly became Sitwell Sitwell. (There was a younger son named Hurt Sitwell.)

Sitwell Sitwell, who inherited an income reputed to amount to £40,000 a year, immediately began extending the house with the help of the Sheffield architect, Joseph Badger, adding the pillars which widened the Jacobean hall, and in 1793 building the apsed dining-room extension with its chimneypiece by John Platt of Rotherham. Badger also constructed the Dairy, the Gothick Temple and other estate buildings.

In 1803 the east wing was begun, including the drawing room, which contains the earliest plasterwork attributed to Sir Francis Chantrey and a chimneypiece by Sir William Chambers, originally in the Albany, Piccadilly, which Sitwell Sitwell purchased from the Duke of York.

He erected the stables to the north-west of the house (also by Joseph Badger) to accommodate his racing stud, his hunters and the hounds which in November 1793 had famously chased and captured a “Royal Bengal Tiger” escaped from a nearby menagerie.

The Prince Regent visited Renishaw with his daughter, Princess Charlotte, in 1808 and made Sitwell Sitwell a baronet. The ballroom, which contains another of the Albany fireplaces, was completed for this occasion:  its ceiling is embellished with the Prince of Wales’ feathers.

Sir Sitwell Sitwell died, of gout or of its treatment, aged 41, in 1811.

Central Park

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Central Park, New York City

Central Park, New York City

Manhattan would be overwhelming without Central Park, the 843-acre green oblong that relieves the remorseless gridiron of streets and avenues.

With admirable prescience that arose from thirty years of debate, in 1853 the city’s authorities purchased the one remaining largely unused site within the 1811 street-plan for five and half million dollars.

The park was laid out from 1856 onwards to the designs of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

The principle of their “Greensward Plan” was that a variety of landscapes, ranging from formal gardens to near wilderness, should present themselves to visitors in a series of apparently natural transitions. The project took twenty years to complete, and occupied up to 3,000 workers.

It is salutary to remember, when walking in Central Park, that to all practical purposes the entire landscape is artificial.

At a time when buildings never reached a greater height than five or six storeys it was possible to arrange, by planting around the park’s borders, that the city would in no way encroach on the illusion of a natural landscape within.

In fact, now that great tower blocks peer above the trees in most directions, an excitement that Olmsted and Vaux could not have predicted sharpens the Park’s appeal.

The designers provided a range of occasional buildings around the Park – the cast-iron Ladies’ Pavilion, the Belvedere Castle and the Gothic Revival Dairy. The most formal composition of all, the Bethesda Fountain, is, significantly, set at an angle to the street-gridiron.

The integrity of Olmsted and Vaux’s design has gradually been encroached upon by other, more obtrusive structures, such as the Delacorte Theater, the Wollman Memorial Rink, the Central Park Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When Edward S Clark of the Singer Sewing Machine Co developed an apartment block at West 72nd Street in 1884 it was nicknamed the Dakota because it was so far out of town.

As the empty plots disappeared under bricks and mortar – and later concrete and steel – Central Park remained as an astonishing piece of urban green half a mile wide and two-and-a-half miles long, stretching from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West (a continuation in all but name of Eighth Avenue) and from 59th Street (also Central Park South) to 110th Street (otherwise Cathedral Parkway).

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Central Park to New York life. It’s a breath of fresh air, a meeting-place for concerts and wakes, a setting for romance and sport. Sometimes it’s been – and still can be – unsafe and notorious for crime, but under normal circumstances, in daylight, it’s one of the most salubrious and enjoyable places in the whole of Manhattan.

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

‘Peggy’ of Castletown

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'Peggy', Manx Nautical Museum, Castletown, Isle of Man (2014)

‘Peggy’, Manx Nautical Museum, Castletown, Isle of Man (2014)

The Isle of Man is rich in romantic stories, some of them true, and none more palpably true than the saga of Peggy, George Quayle’s armed yacht, which recently saw the light of day for the first time in perhaps 180 years.

George Quayle (1751-1835) was a trader, banker and Member of the House of Keys, the Manx parliament, in the lively period of the late eighteenth century when the island’s economy struggled against the Westminster government’s opposition to the Manx habit of smuggling.

Peggy, which was built in 1791, was berthed in a purpose-built basement boathouse beside the harbour in Castletown, within sight of Castle Rushen. She would have had no difficulty in sneaking out to sea from her private dock under cover of darkness: https://vimeo.com/95281569.

After George Quayle died Peggy seems never to have sailed again. Indeed, for almost a century she was apparently forgotten.

By the time word of her existence got about she was the oldest Manx boat in existence, three times unique as the oldest surviving schooner, of shallop construction, and fitted with sliding keels: http://www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk/register/1125/peggy.

After the death of George Quayle’s descendant, Emily Quayle, in 1935, Peggy and her boathouse was bequeathed to the Manx nation and became the centrepiece of the Manx Nautical Museum, which opened in 1951.

She was very gently restored after the Second World War, and has rested intact and largely untouched until 2014, when a series of super-tides threatened her location.

To safeguard her and to assist her long-term conservation Peggy has been craned out of her berth and taken to a climate-controlled environment in Douglas: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-31049837.

The archaeological investigation and preservation process was expected to take at least five years.

What will happen to Peggy at the end of the project remains to be seen, though a recent Manx Heritage statement said, “The intimate links between Peggy and her boathouse are so very important that the final stages of the project will look at ways of housing her there when the conservation work is completed.”

Almost ten years after the restoration of Peggy began, an ambitious scheme to build a museum around her has been announced.  The readers’ comments to the Isle of Man Today (August 9th 2023) are collectors’ items:  Plans to revamp nautical museum are on display | iomtoday.co.im

Baby Grand

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Grand Theatre Doncaster (1984)

Grand Theatre Doncaster (1984)

I’ve never been able to understand why the borough of Doncaster has ignored its dark, neglected but intact Grand Theatre.

Built in 1899 within sight of Doncaster railway station to the designs of John Priestley Briggs (1869–1944), a pupil of Frank Matcham’s, it’s bolted on to the overwhelming Frenchgate Centre (built as the Arndale Centre, 1967), with the dual-carriageway inner relief road clipping the corner of its stage tower.

Most sources credit as joint architect Mr J W Chapman, the owner and lessee of the Old Theatre on Doncaster Market Place, who according to The ERA of April 1st 1899 “designed the whole of the arrangements, and personally drew the plans, which were passed by the Doncaster Corporation”.

Chapman’s specification made the Grand a thoroughly modern theatre, electrically lit using its own generator, heated by a low-pressure hot water system, with a sprinkler system for firefighting. All eight dressing rooms were fitted with hot and cold running water.

The auditorium has three levels, originally the orchestra stalls and pit, the dress circle and above that a balcony and gallery. The two boxes face into the auditorium and are not practical.

The original terra-cotta, cream and gold decorative scheme was executed by Deans of Birmingham.

The 26-foot proscenium is squarely proportioned, with brackets in the upper corners. The stage itself is 70ft wide, 32ft deep and 50ft high.

The roll-call of performers at the Grand runs from Charlie Chaplin to Ken Dodd and Morecambe & Wise, and includes such Yorkshire favourites as Albert Modley, Sandy Powell and Frank Randle.

It was where Julie Andrews’ debut took place when Ted and Barbara Andrews played in the December 1935 pantomime and carried their two-month-old daughter Julie onstage.

The Doncaster Grand was one of the variety theatres featured in BBC broadcasts in 1930s. Live theatre timing was not as tight as broadcasting schedules, so the outside-broadcast unit had to carry whatever came on while they were live on air: at Doncaster they got Florrie Forde, a paper-tearing act – and a troupe of jugglers.

The Grand was taken over by the Essoldo cinema chain in 1944 and it eventually closed in 1958. It operated as a Mecca bingo club from 1961 to 1990. In 1994, while under threat of demolition, it was listed Grade II.

The Friends of the Doncaster Grand Theatre have campaigned ever since for the restoration of the building, which now belongs to Lambert Smith Hampton, the owner of the adjacent Frenchgate Shopping Centre.

Doncaster Borough Council, meanwhile, has opened Cast, its performance venue “where you can watch incredible shows, share creative ideas and be inspired” – “a key driver for the creative industries and evening economy”: http://castindoncaster.com.  It takes a moment to work out why it’s called Cast.

Faced with an intransigent owner and a council facing in a different direction, it must be difficult for the Friends to maintain momentum in their campaign to find the Grand a place in the town’s creative industries: http://friendsofthegrandtheatre.co.uk.

There are urban-explorer reports on the Grand at http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php/66786-The-Grand-Theatre-Doncaster-Nov-2011 and http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php/66941-Grand-Theatre-Doncaster-December-2011.

Update:   It’s a tribute to the persistence of the Friends of the Doncaster Grand Theatre that at long last practical steps are being taken to bring the building back to life:  Join the campaign to reopen Doncaster Grand Theatre (doncasterfreepress.co.uk).

Outpaced

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Darlington Railway Station: Pacer unit 142084

Darlington Railway Station: Pacer unit 142084

Of all the signals of a government’s contempt for the passengers of its nationalised railway, none is more palpably cheap and nasty than the Pacer unit.

They were built for British Rail at a time when economy was paramount, using a four-wheel chassis based on the experimental High Speed Freight Vehicle and bodywork derived from the standard Leyland National bus, another – more successful – attempt at nationwide standardisation built between 1972 and 1985 by British Leyland and the National Bus Company.

Effectively a bus body on a freight-wagon chassis, with basic bus seats and inward opening doors, these lumpen machines pick up every bump and indentation in the track, screech round curves intended for eight-wheeled bogie vehicles and make particularly heavy weather over traversing points and junctions. They are noisy and most are underpowered.

A rear-end collision at Winsford in 1999 showed up the physical frailty of the Pacer design: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/383785.stm.  Fortunately, the unit concerned was running empty, and the driver, at the opposite end of the train to the crash, was unscathed.  But the rear cab was destroyed and the bodywork of both coaches detached from the underframes.

These flimsy trains were built in the 1980s with a design-life of twenty years, but almost all of them are still in service, and they will be needed until at least 2020 because no new diesel railcar units are being built.

A number of early-model Pacers were sold in the late 1990s to the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways where they have not found favour.

There is, inevitably, a Pacer Preservation Society, with a magazine Pacer Chaser: http://www.pacerpreservationsociety.co.uk.

One day, it will only be possible to ride these beasts in a museum. For the foreseeable future, however, regular passengers have no choice: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30945127.

Update:  A BBC News report indicates that the habit of patronising Northern commuters with life-expired rolling stock is set to continue with a proposal to upgrade 1978 District Line trains to work in Yorkshire and Lancashire:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-31536600.

Further update:  The award of the Northern Rail franchise to Arriva Rail North Ltd signals at last the imminent demise of the Pacers:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35048842.

Final update:  The very last Pacer in public service travelled between Kirkby and Manchester Victoria on November 27th 2020:  Final farewell to Northern’s fleet of Pacer trains – BBC News.

Graceland Cemetery: George Mortimer Pullman

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Graceland Cemetery, Chicago: George Mortimer Pullman monument

Graceland Cemetery, Chicago: George Mortimer Pullman monument

George Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897) was a great man who did great things, but he was not popular.

He first gained wealth as an engineer who specialised in moving and lifting wood-frame buildings. He made his fortune jacking up structures when the street-level was raised 6-8 feet to accommodate a sewage system in the low-lying delta of the Chicago River. His party-piece was the lifting of the six-storey Tremont House hotel while the guests remained inside.

His fame, however, rests on the development of the railroad sleeping car, which first appeared in 1864. Again, he pulled off a publicity coup by offering his “palace car” to convey the coffin of the assassinated President Lincoln to his burial in Springfield, Illinois, in 1865.

Pullman’s “hotels on wheels” gave middle-class riders a taste of high life, and rail passengers the world over benefitted from his invention of vestibules between passenger carriages in 1887.

His practice of hiring black men, emancipated slaves who had trained as housemen, to serve as highly skilled, disciplined and well-presented porters in his Pullman cars, is credited with helping to found the African-American middle-class, but the work was onerous and badly paid. The black historian and journalist Thomas Fleming remarked that being a Pullman porter was, paradoxically, “the best job in his community and the worst on the train”.

Even less visible was the smaller number of black women whom Pullman employed to take care of female passengers and their children.

The eponymous company town, Pullman, Illinois, begun in 1880 and designed by the architect Solon Spencer Beman (1853-1914), was an unashamed attempt to create a community of workers untainted by vice, political agitation or freedom of speech.

Crucially, the housing and the apparently generous civic facilities were intended to make a profit from the wages he paid his workers, and when Pullman felt compelled by a downturn in orders in 1894 to reduce wages and increase working hours, he saw no reason at the same time to reduce rents.

The resulting strike, which practically shut down the nation’s transport system, was quashed violently by federal troops provided by President Grover Cleveland.

When George Pullman died in 1897, he was buried in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.  His elegant monument, a single Corinthian column, was designed by Solon Spencer Beman.

His family were so concerned that union members might defile his grave that he was buried in a lead-lined mahogany coffin, encased in a room-sized block of concrete, pinned down by railway rails and covered by another layer of concrete.

The forthright American journalist Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce commented, “It is clear the family in their bereavement was making sure the sonofabitch wasn’t going to get up and come back.”

No-one will ever exhume George Pullman in a hurry.

 

Graceland Cemetery: Victor Fremont Lawson

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Graceland Cemetery, Chicago: Victor Fremont Lawson monument

Graceland Cemetery, Chicago: Victor Fremont Lawson monument

As well as the ‘Eternal Silence’ figure for Dexter Graves, the Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft supplied the thirteen-foot granite statue of ‘The Crusader’ (1931) for a monument that carries no name, but only the motto “Above all things truth beareth away victory”.

This is the tomb of Victor Fremont Lawson (1850-1925), who ran the Chicago Daily News from 1876 to the year of his death and was a co-founder and first president of Associated Press.

The Chicago Daily News broke new ground by publishing concise stories and popular features, aiming for a wider readership than its rivals. It depended on Lawson’s business acumen and capital – derived from his father’s real-estate fortune – to support its low cover-price.

In journalism he was an innovator, developing the use of foreign correspondents, syndication and classified advertising. He made the Daily News a platform for advocating urban reform and improved civic infrastructure and services, particularly during the period of the World’s Fair of 1893 and the creation of the Chicago Plan of 1909.

Lawson was also a philanthropist, supporting such organisations as the Daily News Fresh Air Fund and the YMCA.

He was a member of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations which reflected on the city’s race riots of 1919. Its influential report, The Negro in Chicago: a study of race relations and a race riot (1922), was compiled by the Commission’s Associate Executive Secretary, Charles S Johnson: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4977.

The monument was commissioned by Victor Lawson’s younger brother, Iver N Lawson. The crusader, bearing his sword and shield, was intended to symbolise the campaigning spirit of the great journalist, businessman and philanthropist.

Graceland Cemetery: Dexter Graves

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Graceland Cemetery, Chicago: Dexter Graves monument

Graceland Cemetery, Chicago: Dexter Graves monument

One of three major Victorian cemeteries in Chicago, Graceland Cemetery (1860) is located alongside a railway line that brought mourners and coffins over two miles north from the city-centre, like Brookwood Cemetery in England and Rookwood Cemetery in Australia.

The original eighty-acre site was landscaped as parkland by Horace W S Cleveland (1814-1900), who had also designed Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord, Massachusetts in 1855.

It was enlarged to the north-west and the east by the architect Ossian Cole Simonds (1855-1931), who also designed Lincoln Park on the site of the former City Cemetery which closed after the Civil War.

The Graceland Cemetery chapel, recently restored, was designed by the Chicago practice of William Holabird (1854-1923) and Martin Roche (1853-1927) in 1888.

The 119-acre cemetery continues to operate under the control of the not-for-profit Trustees of the Graceland Cemetery Improvement Fund. It is freely open to the public: http://www.gracelandcemetery.org.

The most haunting of all the magnificent monuments in Graceland Cemetery is the tomb of Dexter Graves (1789 – 1844), with its bronze figure of ‘Eternal Silence’, the work of the sculptor Lorado Taft (1860-1936), cast by Jules Bercham of the American Art Foundry.

Originally the entire figure was painted black, and over the years the metal has oxidised to an eerie green everywhere except the face.

Dexter Graves was a member of an early contingent of Chicago settlers who, according to the inscription at the back of the monument, “brought the first colony to Chicago, consisting of 13 families, arriving here July 15, 1831 from Ashtabula, Ohio, on the schooner Telegraph.” A former tavern-keeper, Graves opened the Mansion House hotel on Lake Street, but died, soon after his daughters Lucy and Emeline, in April 1844.

Father and daughters were interred in the Chicago City Cemetery on North Avenue, and when that cemetery closed they were reinterred at Graceland.

It was Dexter Graves’ last surviving son Henry who, having no immediate heirs, commissioned the monument.

Henry Graves died in 1907, and the monument was in place by 1909.

Little Germany

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66 Vicar Lane, Little Germany, Bradford

66 Vicar Lane, Little Germany, Bradford

Bradford’s Victorian prosperity was boosted by the dyeing trade led by the firm of Edward Ripley & Sons, and the invention of mechanical combing by Samuel Lister of Manningham Mills – and from the remarkable influx of German immigrant merchants, such families as Schuster, Behrens, Zessenheim and Moser, whose warehouses clustered on the hill that is now known as Little Germany within the tight network of streets above Leeds Old Road.

Most of these companies were already established in Bradford before they moved into the grand warehouses in the 1860s and early 1870s. They were encouraged to diversify when trade was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, only to suffer a sudden economic downturn from 1875 onwards with the introduction of tariff barriers by France, Germany and Austria.

At the same time unexpected changes in female fashions caught manufacturers unprepared, and though the Bradford wool trade eventually adapted, no further buildings were constructed in Little Germany until 1902.

The impressive architectural display of the Little Germany stuff- (ie, worsted) warehouses masks a tightly-organised functional building-type, comparable with the cotton warehouses of central Manchester.

John S Roberts, in Little Germany (Bradford Art Galleries & Museums 1977), describes in detail how “grey” cloth was brought into the ground-floor receiving bay, promptly sent out for dyeing and, on its return, hoisted by steam-power to the top floor for inspection and sorting, stored and then after sale sent to the ground-floor packing area for dispatch.

Only wholesale customers and senior staff used the front entrance and the show staircase to the upper floors.

Many of the Little Germany buildings were designed by the local architect Eli Milnes (1830-1899), in some cases as speculative developments. Milnes was in partnership with Charles France (1833-1902) from 1863 onwards. The other local architectural practices – Andrews & Delauney, Lockwood & Mawson and Milnes & France, together with the Leeds architect George Corson, participated in the short-lived building boom.

After the decline of the Bradford woollen industry in the 1960s and early 1970s almost all of the Little Germany buildings were redeveloped: many warehouses became offices, and a former temperance hall was converted into a theatre, initially known as The Priestley after the novelist who was its first president, and eventually in 2012 relaunched as Bradford Playhouse: http://www.bradfordplayhouse.org.uk.

In 2012 the mail-order clothing company Freeman Grattans Holdings, an amalgamation of the London-based Freeman Company and the Bradford-based Grattan, moved into 1860s offices at 66-70 Vicar Lane within Little Germany.

FGH has a German owner, Otto UK.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs 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.