Exploring New South Wales: Newcastle Cathedral

Cathedral Church of Christ the King, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Cathedral Church of Christ the King, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Every major Australian and New Zealand city possesses at least one, usually two, fine cathedrals, many of them started in the Gothic Revival style in the early years of settlement.  Some, such as St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Perth and Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, were completed to newer, cheaper, more practical designs;  others such as William Wilkinson Wardell’s magnificent St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, and St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, were eventually completed as the original architect intended.

The Cathedral Church of Christ the King, Newcastle, New South Wales, begun in 1869, is a superb essay in Gothic Revival style by the Canadian-born architect John Horbury Hunt (1838-1904), who designed (among much else) Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton (1881-4), St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral, Armidale (1871) and rebuilt the charming little church of St James, Morpeth after a fire (1874-7) – all three in New South Wales.

The original design by the architects Leonard Terry (1825–1884) and Robert Speechly (1840-1884) proved unworkable, and John Horbury Hunt provided a new design in 1882.  It has the signature of this talented, often controversial architect – an uncompromising choice of materials, in this case brick, and a forthright acceptance of asymmetry.  The building as it stands is not exactly as John Horbury Hunt intended:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/uon/4128635375/in/photostream.

Construction stalled in 1893 in a flurry of litigation over contracts and costs, and resumed in 1900 under the supervision of the Sydney architect John Hingeston Buckeridge (1857-1934), so that the nave and crossing could be brought into use in 1902.

Thereafter, a succession of architects progressively extended the building:  Frederick George & A C Castleden designed the Warrior’s Chapel (1924) at the east end, using Buckeridge’s plans, and the nave was completed with a roof unlike Hunt’s intention in 1928.

E C Sara of the practice Castleden & Sara added the Columbarium in 1955.  Eventually, in 1979, the transepts and tower were completed, largely according to Hunt’s intentions, by E C Sara’s son John.

The only omission from the spirit of Hunt’s design was the spire, which is almost certainly for the best, because the Cathedral was damaged in the 1989 earthquake, and the repairs that took place in 1995-1997 were only practicable because of the quality of the original structure:  http://www.newcastlecathedral.org.au/earthquake.html.

The result is a magnificent, remarkably harmonious essay in Gothic architecture, completed in the 1970s and rescued in the 1990s.  At the time of its consecration in 1983 it had been in use for eighty years.

I was fortunate to be shown round by Bronwyn Orrock, who has inventorised the cathedral’s many treasures, including sixty stained-glass windows by Kempe & Co and one, the Dies Domini window of 1907, by Edward Burne-Jones and Morris & Co.

The font and the bishop’s throne are by William Douglas Caroe (1857-1938);  the pulpit is by the German-born artist Frederick Burnhardt  Menkens (1855-1910);  in the Warriors’ Chapel are fourteen terracotta panels designed by the Doulton ceramicist George Tinworth (1843-1913).

The Cathedral is the parent church of Toc H in Australia and is rich in war memorials, from Gallipoli, Flanders, Singapore, Korea, Malaya and Vietnam.

Newcastle is, perhaps, off the tourist beat, yet Christ Church Cathedral is one of the most memorable buildings I’ve so far seen in this vast and varied country.

The Cathedral website is at www.newcastlecathedral.org.au.

Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Gothic Down Under:  English architecture in the Antipodes explores the influence of British architects, and British-trained architects, on the design of churches and other buildings in the emerging communities of Australia and New Zealand.  For details, please click here.

Exploring New South Wales: Newcastle

Ocean Baths, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Ocean Baths, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Newcastle, New South Wales is a Geordie home-from-home.

The deep-water estuary of the Hunter River was recognised as a source of coal as soon as it was first explored, in 1797.  After it ceased to be a penal settlement in 1822-3, it was colonised primarily by miners from Northumberland and Durham:  it’s slightly unnerving to anyone who knows the north-east England to find that the Australian city has satellites with names such as Gateshead, Hexham, Jesmond, Morpeth, Pelaw, Stockton and Wallsend.

Already exporting the greatest volume of coal of any harbour in the world, Newcastle expected to increase its annual tonnage from 97Mt in 2009-10 to 180Mt by 2013.

Yet the seashore has beaches as fine as any in Great Britain.  Indeed, it’s probably the only place in the world where miners can go surfing at the weekend, if not immediately after work.

As an alternative to surfing, the seashore offers the open-air Ocean Baths (1922) [http://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.au/recreation/beaches_and_pools/ocean_baths] and the Merewether Baths (1935) [http://envisagedcity.com/2012/02/04], where you can swim in a pool with a sea-view to the horizon.

Like its English counterpart, the Australian Newcastle suffered an economic downturn as the traditional manufacturing industries, particularly steel, went into decline at the end of the last century, but in the past decade the Australian port has been boosted by increases in the prices of coal and iron and easy access to Asian markets.

Newcastle has some of Australia’s finest surviving theatre-buildings, the disused Victoria Theatre (1891) [http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;search=place_name%3Dvictoria%2520theatre%3Bkeyword_PD%3Don%3Bkeyword_SS%3Don%3Bkeyword_PH%3Don%3Blatitude_1dir%3DS%3Blongitude_1dir%3DE%3Blongitude_2dir%3DE%3Blatitude_2dir%3DS%3Bin_region%3Dpart;place_id=100971], the Regent Cinema, Islington (1928) [http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2012/05/07/3497267.htm], presently a hardware store, and the still-functioning Civic Theatre (1929) [http://www.civictheatrenewcastle.com.au/index.php?pg_id=26].  Newcastle’s historic theatres and cinemas are listed at http://www.urbaninsider.com.au/uimap/newcastles-hidden-theatres.

Though Newcastle lost some historic buildings in the 1989 earthquake, its most prominent landmark, the Cathedral Church of Christ the King survived.  The Cathedral is such a magnificent building it deserves an article all to itself.

Exploring New South Wales: by rail from Sydney to Newcastle

View from Noah's on the Beach, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

View from Noah’s on the Beach, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

One of the joys of working for the Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Societies, lecturing on one of their three circuits, was the opportunity to travel to ordinary parts of Australia, away from the tourist tracks, and whenever possible – as I did in New Zealand – I took the opportunity to travel surface so that I could see the landscape.

Accordingly, when I lectured to a succession of societies in New South Wales, I travelled twice by rail on the Main North Line from Sydney to Armidale.

This line was the original connection to Queensland, opened between Newcastle and Wallangarra between 1857 and 1888, and then completed south to Sydney in 1889.

The southern section out of Sydney was the most difficult to construct and is the most spectacular.

Once out of the north Sydney suburbs it shares a route with the freeway, then plunges into the four Boronia Tunnels to Hawkesbury River Station.  From there it disappears into Long Island Tunnel, crosses the thousand-yard Hawkesbury River Bridge (1946, replacing the 1889 original) and immediately enters Mullet Creek Tunnel then skirts the waterside, after Wondabyne Station, into Woy Woy Tunnel, slightly over a mile long.  On the way to Gosford the train provides a panorama of the river, alive with boats.

Beyond Gosford the landscape becomes mundane as the line travels through something we no longer have in Britain – an active coalfield.  There are collieries, a power station, a station with the evocative name Sulphide Junction, and another which was originally Windy Creek but was later renamed, by a popular vote of its Welsh miner inhabitants, Cardiff.

Suburban trains from Sydney actually terminate in the city of Newcastle, but I was booked on the once-a-day, more comfortable CountryLink service and disembarked at Broadmeadow, the out-of-town station in the Newcastle suburbs, to meet my Newcastle DFAS hostess Gwen Hamilton.

The Society booked me into the excellent Noah’s-on-the-Beach [http://www.noahsonthebeach.com.au/page3102/Home-.aspx], to which one day I’ll return.  The only facility it didn’t offer was free wi-fi, for which I trekked to the Bakehouse, 87-89 Hunter Street.

 

Mothballed Odeon

Former Odeon Cinema, Morecambe, Lancashire

Former Odeon Cinema, Morecambe, Lancashire

Two things intrigue me about the former Odeon Cinema, Morecambe.

Opened in 1937, it’s an absolutely typical product of Oscar Deutsch’s house-architects, the Harry Weedon partnership, featuring a Moderne fin-shaped tower and a quirky projecting exterior corridor, clad in brick and cream faience.  It seated 1,084 in the stalls and 476 in the circle:  http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6067.

I’m puzzled that it stands some distance from the seafront, so that it was never part of the sequence of promenade crowd-pullers, the Alhambra, the Winter Gardens and the two piers, in the days when Morecambe attracted crowds.

It stands on Euston Road, near to the less prominent of Morecambe’s former two stations.

I’m also interested to know what state the interior is in.

It now earns its keep as a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom showroom for Homemakers 1st Stop:  http://www.thehomemakers.co.uk.

As soon as you walk in, through what would have been a side exit, it’s clear that you’re standing in the stalls, with the curve of the balcony overhead, but a suspended ceiling hides the auditorium space.

The lady behind the counter told me she’s never actually been in the circle, which is blocked off, but she’s been told that the projection box remains intact.

Long may it remain so.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage 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.

Morecambe’s forgotten music hall

Former Devonshire Hall music hall, Morecambe, Lancashire

Former Devonshire Hall music hall, Morecambe, Lancashire

In the back streets of Morecambe’s West End, usefully employed as a specialist community centre, lies a long-forgotten music hall.

The Devonshire Hall was built in 1899, seating eight hundred people, two hundred of them in the balcony.

It consists of a ground-floor that must always have been shops, and at first-floor level a flat-floored auditorium.

Dangerfield’s General Entertainment Guide (1901) informs potential letting clients of “Has no dramatic license [sic];…  Platform permanent 14 by 12 deep with electric footlights;  Terms one night 40s, a reduction made for a longer period;  Extras electric light per meter;  Has dressing rooms”.

The building was divided in the 1930s, the upper floor used a snooker hall while the ground floor became a paint factory.

In 1996 it became a music centre and rehearsal space, The Hothouse, for More Music, a community music and education charity founded in 1993:  http://www.moremusic.org.uk.

The first phase of renovation by seven architecture [sic] [http://www.sevenarchitecture.co.uk/projects/category/id/1/project/2] was completed in 2011.  The fine original timber and steel roof remains in situ but is invisible and inaccessible above a suspended ceiling.

The not-for-profit occupiers have put the building to excellent purpose – http://www.thevisitor.co.uk/news/morecambe-and-district-news/more-music-announced-as-chosen-charity-1-5471446 – and given it a better chance of survival than most of Morecambe’s entertainment heritage has had.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage 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.

Home of The Entertainer

Former Alhambra Theatre, Morecambe, Lancashire

Former Alhambra Theatre, Morecambe, Lancashire

The Alhambra Theatre, Morecambe, the location of Laurence Olivier’s performances as Archie Rice in the 1960 film The Entertainer, still exists though its interior has gone.

A major fire in 1970 completely destroyed the auditorium, including its roof, though the stage-tower remains.

When the shell was rebuilt the Dutch gable of the façade was removed and the proscenium opening was bricked up.

According to Tony Parkinson [‘Morecambe’s early cinemas’, Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin Vol 46, No 5 (September/October 2012), p 5] the interior of the fly tower remains intact.

The Alhambra was designed by the local architect Herbert Howarth as a music hall and opened in 1901.

Because it replaced the former West End market (1889), its ground floor was given over to shops and market stalls, with the auditorium at first-floor level.

Built at a cost of £50,000, it was a financial liability from the start.  The leader of the consortium that built it, Alderman Gardner, filed for bankruptcy in 1911 with liabilities of £62,257 12s 6d.

A new company took it over in 1919 for £50,000 and invested a further £30,000 on replacing the market stalls with twenty lock-up shops, replacing 700 of the 2,000 chairs with tip-up seating and installing a £,3,000 organ.

In 1927 it became a cinema full-time, and when sound was installed in 1930 it was renamed the Astoria.

It remained closed throughout the Second World War, and reopened in 1946 as a theatre.

After the 1970 fire the auditorium-space became a night club.  At present it’s closed.

There’s a compilation of clips from The Entertainer, with an oddly inappropriate music track, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrP-5BvYM68.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage 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.

Tribune Tower

Tribune Tower, Chicago

Tribune Tower, Chicago

The southern end of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile is marked by two magnificent buildings, the grey limestone, Gothic Tribune Tower (1922-5) by the New York architects, John Mead Howells (1868-1959) and Raymond Mathewson Hood (1881-1934), opposite the white faience, Renaissance Wrigley Building.

The Tribune Tower was built for the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Robert Rutherford “Colonel” McCormick (1880-1955) – a tall, authoritative, notably hard-working arch-conservative, described by an opponent as having “the greatest mind of the fourteenth century”.

His great-uncle was Cyrus Hall McCormick Snr (1809-1884), the developer of the mechanical reaper who brought its manufacture to Chicago.  His maternal grandfather was Joseph Medill (1823-1899), Mayor of Chicago and the founder of the Tribune.

The Tribune was never knowingly undersold:  it claimed to be the “World’s Greatest Newspaper”, and its radio- and television-stations each took the call-sign WGN.

McCormick turned the architectural competition to build “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world” into a long-running promotional campaign as part of a circulation war with William Randolph Hearst’s Herald-Examiner.

Howells & Hood’s design must have appealed to McCormick because of its essential conservatism:  it is the last of the line of Gothic skyscrapers that began with Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building in Manhattan.  Its composition is a triumph of perpendicular lines, surmounted by a turret based on the Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral, 34 storeys and 463 feet high.

Images of some of the other competing designs can be seen at http://www.chicagosavvytours.com/apps/blog/categories/show/931122-chicago-tribune-tower.

McCormick encouraged his correspondents to obtain stone fragments from monuments around the world, 120 of which are now embedded in the lower storeys.

The entrance door is surmounted by a celebrated stone screen depicting Aesop’s Fables, and the architects are commemorated by a pair of rebuses, that is, heraldic puns – a howling dog and a figure of Robin Hood.

The Tribune Tower is a fine example of an honourable architectural tradition, yet it’s ironic that the more influential competition entry was second-placed:  the design by the Finn Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950) was the basis for the Gulf Building (1929) in Houston, Texas.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City:  the architecture of Chicago please click here.

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

The benefits of chewing gum

William Wrigley Junior Building, Chicago

William Wrigley Junior Building, Chicago

“Life is what happens…,” John Lennon wrote, “while you’re making other plans.”

William Wrigley Junior (1861-1932) arrived in Chicago at the age of twenty-nine believing he’d make his fortune selling Wrigley’s Scouring Soap.

As a marketing ploy he offered a tie-in with baking powder, and found the baking powder sold better than the soap.

So he took to selling baking powder, with an offer of chewing-gum.

The chewing-gum proved more popular than the baking powder and Wrigley’s fortune was made.

He launched his Juicy Fruit and Spearmint brands in 1893 and at the end of the First World War, when the Michigan Avenue Bridge was under construction, he commissioned the Chicago architects Graham, Anderson, Probst & White to design the William Wrigley Junior Building (1919-24).

This much-loved structure heralded the opening up of North Michigan Avenue after the bridge opened in 1920.

The Wrigley Building’s odd geometry reconciles the curve of the river to the gridiron street-plan:  in fact, it divides into two buildings, of which the taller, 30-storey riverside tower has hardly more than half the floor-space of its 21-storey annex.

Its gleaming white surface, suggestive of the product that paid for it, consists of six gradations of faience, from a cream at ground-level to a blue-white at the turret.

Wrigley used part of his fortune to embellish Chicago in other ways.

As the majority owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball team from 1921 he gave his name to their ballpark, Wrigley Field, in 1926, from which the surrounding area gained the name Wrigleyville.

In 1928 he paid for James Earle Fraser’s reliefs on the northern bridgehouses of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, literally outside the front door of his office building.

All this grew from a substance, chicle, that was originally imported from Mexico as a possible substitute for rubber, but proved marketable as a chewing product.

“Life is what happens…while you’re making other plans.”

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City:  the architecture of Chicago please click here.

The magnificent bridge to the Magnificent Mile

Michigan Avenue Bridge, Chicago

Michigan Avenue Bridge, Chicago

If any one structure can depict the entire history of Chicago it’s the Michigan Avenue Bridge, formally named since 2010 the DuSable Bridge after Chicago’s first non-Native inhabitant, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable (before 1750-1818)

Constructed between 1918 and 1920, it opened up the area north of the Chicago River and extended the city’s retail quarter into the area that is now known as the Magnificent Mile.

It was designed for the Chicago Department of Public Works, Bureau of Engineering, led by the engineer William A. Mulcahy in consultation with the planner Edward H Bennett (1874-1954), who had co-authored the Chicago Plan of 1909 with the better-known Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912).

There’s more to this bridge than meets the eye as you walk or drive across it.

It’s significant as the first bascule bridge across the Chicago River.  All previous bridges over this busy waterway were swing bridges, which were frequently closed to road traffic through the day.

It’s actually two parallel bridges which can be raised separately.  If either bascule needs repair it can be fixed in the raised position while traffic continues uninterrupted over the other.

And, though it’s not apparent from street level, it has two decks, the lower deck leading directly to the docks and riverside.

Furthermore, its northern abutment stands on the site of Du Sable’s original residence and the southern abutment occupies the location of Fort Dearborn (1803-4), the US Army base which encouraged the growth of the settlement that became the city of Chicago.

For these reasons the bridge is lavishly decorated with reliefs depicting scenes from the first discovery of the site by Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette in 1673 to the rebuilding after the Chicago Fire of 1871.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City: the architecture of Chicago please click here.

Bull Bridge Aqueduct

Bull Bridge Aqueduct, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (1967)

Bull Bridge Aqueduct, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (1967)

My journeys to school in the early 1960s were punctuated by a pause on the road through Bull Bridge, near Ambergate in Derbyshire, for the traffic lights that controlled the tight gothic arch of Bull Bridge Aqueduct on the Cromford Canal.

The canal had not been used since before the Second World War and the arch was impossible for any vehicle larger than a single-deck bus.

The A610 road was already a significant link in the 1960s, and would become more important when the Ripley by-pass was opened in 1977.

It was inevitable, therefore, that Jessop and Outram’s tiny road-arch had to go.  It was demolished in 1968 – shortly followed by the adjacent iron-trough aqueduct that had been inserted into the canal when George Stephenson drove the North Midland Railway through in 1839.

In the 1960s no-one in their wildest dreams would have expected the Cromford Canal to be restored, but the Friends of the Cromford Canal plan to return the whole canal to navigation, however long it takes, and so one day an elegant new aqueduct will span the road and the railway, rather like the New Semington Aqueduct (2004) on the Kennet and Avon Canal:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Semington_Aqueduct.