Exploring Sydney: Elizabeth Bay House

Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, Australia:  Saloon

Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, Australia: Saloon

The inlet to the west of Darling Point, where Campbell Drummon Riddell built Lindesay House, is Elizabeth Bay.

Here another Scot, Alexander Macleay (1767-1848), obtained a grant of 54 acres of land from Governor Darling in order to lay out an extensive and magnificent garden in 1826.

He eventually began Elizabeth Bay House in 1835, employing the architect John Verge (1782-1861) to design a grand Palladian villa, very unlike the Gothic gloom of Lindesay House.

Macleay was financially incompetent, preoccupied with his interest in entomology.  Indeed, his appointment as Colonial Secretary of New South Wales was dictated by the need to bring his finances under control.

The strategy failed:  he lost his government post in 1837 (though he was later appointed Speaker of the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843), and the house was only rendered habitable when his more astute son, William Sharp Macleay (1792-1865), retired to Sydney in 1839.

Even so, a severe economic downturn in the colony obliged the Macleays to begin subdividing the estate in 1841, and by 1844 Alexander Macleay’s bills were being directed to his son’s account.  Furniture from Elizabeth Bay House was sold to furnish Government House in central Sydney when it was completed in 1845.

In fact, the elegant exterior of Elizabeth Bay House is unfinished.  John Verge intended a single-storey colonnade to extend around three sides of the building.  The existing portico was added in 1893 because Lady Macleay, the mother of a later owner, James William Macarthur Onslow, feared for the safety of her guests in the morning room, where French windows opened on to a sheer drop where the planned colonnade would have stood.

Nevertheless, Elizabeth Bay House is by all accounts one of the most impressive of Australian nineteenth-century domestic interiors.  Its crowning glory is the oval saloon with its cantilevered staircase, possibly based on Henry Holland’s Carlton House Terrace in London (1811) and reminiscent of James Paine’s Stockeld Park, Yorkshire, of 1757-63.

Alexander Macleay’s estate was repeatedly subdivided for housing development, until only three acres remained in 1882.  Eventually, the house itself was bought by a development company in 1926, and the year after the remaining three acres was itself divided into sixteen lots, only five of which found buyers.

The house was divided into flats in the early 1940s, and remained in multiple use until it became a museum in 1977.  It is now administered by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, restored as far as possible to its condition when the Macleays first moved in.

Here too, as at Lindesay House, you can stand at the front door and gaze across Sydney Harbour, ignoring the modern development all around and imagining the stupendous beauty of the place when Sydney itself was barely fifty years old.

The guidebook to Elizabeth Bay House is at http://www.hht.net.au/discover/highlights/guidebooks/elizabeth_bay_house_guidebook.

 

Exploring Sydney: Lindesay House

Lindesay House, Sydney, Australia

Lindesay House, Sydney, Australia

The most distinctive feature of Sydney’s vast harbour is its diversity – a seemingly endless succession of bays and promontories, best viewed from the fleet of ferries that departs in all directions from Circular Quay.

In nineteenth century, before the city extended outwards, the outlying areas of the bay were remote retreats where leading figures of the time built exclusive residences, some of which survive – and some of which remain exclusive.

On Darling Point, in 1834, the Scots-born Campbell Drummond Riddell (1796-1858), Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales, built Lindesay House, one of the first examples in the colony of what Australians now call “domestic Gothic” style, naming it after the Acting Governor, Lieutenant Patrick Lindesay.

After the Riddells left Australia in 1838, a subsequent owner divided the estate into eighteen plots for development, and another Scot, Sir Thomas Mitchell (1792-1855), Surveyor General of New South Wales, bought the house and five of the plots in 1841.  On one of these plots he built another Gothic house, Carthona, which became his residence, and he sold Lindesay on to Sir Charles Nicholson (1808-1903), the first Speaker of the New South Wales Legislative Council and one of the founders of the University of Sydney.

The house passed through a succession of subsequent ownerships until in 1963 the last private owner, Walter Pye, donated it to the National Trust of Australia.

The Trust opens it to the public one afternoon a month.  At other times it is a “much sought-after venue by brides”, though rationed to only twelve major functions a year.

The very perfunctory Lonely Planet review states, “It’s rarely open but aside from Nicole Kidman inviting you in for tea, this is probably your best chance to look inside an actual Darling Point mansion.”

I was, therefore, very lucky to have a Sydney DFAS contact, Margaret, who was prepared to give me a personal tour of the house, so I could see how, despite the encroachments of later development, you can still stand on the lawn and gaze across one of the most beautiful harbours in the world.

Details of visiting arrangements for Lindesay House are at http://www.nationaltrust.org.au/nsw/Lindesay.

 

The other Chester Cathedral

St John's Church, Chester

St John’s Church, Chester

St John’s Church, Chester, which lies outside the city walls near the half-exposed Roman amphitheatre, looks to all practical purposes Victorian, though with a ruined east end that has to be older and a stump of a tower in south-west corner.

When you step inside, the fine Norman interior comes as a surprise.

It has an architectural feature unique among English churches – the nave arcades have a barely perceptible but deliberate outward lean – and there is a noteworthy wall-painting of St John the Baptist on one of the columns.

This church was from 1075 until 1102 the cathedral of the former diocese of Lichfield, and even after the see was transferred to Coventry, St John’s remained a nominal cathedral within what was known as the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield until the Reformation, when the nave became a parish church and the east end was left to ruin.

You can see in the Norman architecture exactly where the bishop’s departure interrupted the building programme:  the nave triforium and clerestory are anything up to a century newer than the arches on which they stand.

Although the Victorian architect R C Hussey had carried out a restoration in 1859-66, the mainly sixteenth-century north-west tower collapsed in 1881.  The Chester architect John Douglas rebuilt the north porch, leaving the ruins of the Norman choir and Lady Chapel and the fourteenth-century choir chapels.

Most historic buildings are a palimpsest – a document repeatedly erased and rewritten – but St John’s has suffered more alterations than most.

St John’s Church is open daily for visitors and worshippers.  No admission-charge is levied, and donations are welcomed:  http://www.parishofchester.com/donations.html.

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

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic Chester tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 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.

The Scrape School

Chester Cathedral

Chester Cathedral

The present-day Chester Cathedral began as the tenth-century church of St Werburgh, was refounded as a Benedictine abbey by the Norman Hugh Lupus, first Earl of Chester, and at the Dissolution of the Monasteries became the centre of a new diocese, when the last abbot became the first Dean of Chester.  (Henry VIII had apparently first considered locating the see at Fountains, where the abbey buildings were kept intact for a brief, deliberate pause.)

The present building was begun in 1092 and then remodelled and enlarged from the late thirteenth century onwards:  the later generations of builders kept their work in harmony with their predecessors, as did their contemporaries at Westminster Abbey and Beverley Minster.

Its exterior has been so repeatedly and heavily restored, by Thomas Harrison (1818-20), R C Hussey (from 1844), Sir George Gilbert Scott (from 1868) and Sir Arthur W Blomfield (after 1882), that it’s difficult to be sure if any of the visible fabric is earlier than the nineteenth century.

Certainly the apse at the end of the south choir aisle, with its exaggerated roof, is pure Scott.  This most notorious of the Victorian “Scrape” school of restorers, obsessively committed to tidying up and purifying the style of medieval churches, was heavily criticised for his work at Chester, yet some of his contributions, such as the choir screen and its wrought-iron gates (1876) are now highly-regarded designs in their own right.

He was not the only author of Victorian depredations:  Dean Howson, regrettably, ordered the removal of five medieval misericords, of which the subject-matter was considered to be “very improper”.

Ironically the medieval shrine of St Werburgh survived the Reformation because the base was used for the Bishop’s throne.  Sir Arthur W Blomfield restored it as best he could in the late Victorian period.

The Chapter House, described by Pevsner as “the aesthetic climax of the cathedral”, dates from the thirteenth-century, but was restored by R C Hussey in the mid-nineteenth century.  Similarly, the south side of the cloisters is a reproduction by Sir George Gilbert Scott.  The refectory, still with its monastic pulpit, has an east window by Giles Gilbert Scott, installed in 1913, and the roof is by F H Crossley, completed in 1939.

In contrast, the most modern, uncompromising yet least obtrusive addition to the Cathedral is the Addleshaw Tower, a detached bell-tower by George Pace, completed in 1972-4, after the old bell-frame in the central tower was found to be beyond safe restoration.

So Chester Cathedral looks now like it never did in the past.  This is true of most ancient buildings.  I think this complexity makes it all the more interesting, once you know what you’re looking at.

Chester Cathedral operates as a tourist attraction, charging for entry outside service-times:  http://www.chestercathedral.com/chester-cathedral-visiting-opening-hours.htm.

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

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic Chester tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 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.

The most perfect of all station houses 1

Wingfield Station, South Wingfield, Derbyshire (1976)

Wingfield Station, South Wingfield, Derbyshire (1976)

The 2012 version of the Victorian Society’s Top Ten Endangered Buildings list headlined Wingfield Station, Derbyshire of 1840, by Francis Thompson (1808-1895), one of the very first architects to specialise in designing railway buildings: Wingfield Station, Derbyshire | Victorian Society.

The Transport Trust considers that “Francis Thompson’s best work was on the North Midland Railway, between Derby and Leeds”, yet all the others have disappeared, apart from one small isolated structure at Chesterfield and his Railway Village, next to the main station in Derby.

Wingfield Station appeared, transformed into a suburban villa, in a supplement to John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture.

As long ago as 1950 Christian Barman, author of the pioneer study An Introduction to Railway Architecture, described it as “the most perfect of all station houses”.

Passenger services ceased in 1967, but trains still thunder past twenty-four hours a day:  the North Midland line remains a major trunk route between Sheffield and London, and between the North East and South West of England.

Soon after the station closed to passengers it was bought as a residence, but the passing trains must have made life intolerable.  For several decades the building has simply been left to rot, and lead thefts have led to extensive water damage.

The Victorian Society commentary unequivocally lays the blame for the dire condition of this beautiful little building on neglect by the private owner and negligence by the local planning authority, Amber Valley Council:  “The building has seen too much time go by to wait any longer. The council needs to take action urgently:  compulsory purchase looks to be the only answer.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the national publicity will lead to a burst of energy from a cash-strapped council.

Even more interesting will be the search for a practical use for an elegant station building with too many trains and no passengers.

Snow Hill revived

Snow Hill Station, Birmingham (1975)

Snow Hill Station, Birmingham (1975)

The absurdities of Victorian railway competition are only equalled by the profligate waste of the railway closures in the 1960s.

Birmingham’s two main stations lie at right-angles to each other, on different levels and several hundred yards apart, because three entirely separate and competing companies built the lines into Birmingham.

The Great Western Railway’s Snow Hill Station, first opened in 1852, developed into a magnificent red-brick and terracotta structure of 1911-12 behind J A Chatwin’s grand Great Western Hotel of 1875.

In 1961 a scheme was published to turn Snow Hill into “the most modern railway terminal in Europe”.

As late as 1964, during the electrification of the West Coast Main Line, it handled 130,000 trains and 7,500,000 passengers, compared with 175,000 trains and 10,000,000 passengers at New Street.

Later in the 1960s many former GWR services were closed or diverted to the redeveloped New Street, except for Stratford and Warwick local services which terminated at the suburban-relief station at Moor Street, south of the Inner Ring Road.

The Great Western Hotel was demolished in 1971.  Snow Hill Station itself remained derelict after the last train-service finished in 1972, became structurally unsafe and was eventually cleared in 1979.

However, from 1987 the Moor Street services again ran through the reopened tunnel, and a new Snow Hill Station was incorporated in the unlovely Colmore Court office-development.

Since 2001 the Birmingham to Wolverhampton service of the West Midlands Metro has used a platform of Snow Hill station as its city-centre terminus.

So, apart from the fact that more trains run from Moor Street than Snow Hill, and the second London service runs to Marylebone rather than Paddington, there are relatively few significant differences in the availability of services now than there were in 1960.

Hindsight is a wonderful luxury, but I can’t help wondering if the planners’ plans really added up correctly in the 1960s, any more than the haphazard eccentricities of Victorian laissez-faire did 110 years previously.

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

Great Western Arcade

Great Western Arcade, Birmingham

Great Western Arcade, Birmingham

Birmingham’s finest shopping arcade, the Great Western Arcade, was built, as its name suggests, on the girders which were installed to cover the open railway cutting leading into Snow Hill Station in 1874.

Designed by the Birmingham architect W H Ward, it lost its top storey, its dome and the original design of the entrance to Colmore Row in the Birmingham blitz.  Sympathetically refurbished by Douglas Hickman of the John Madin Design Group in 1984-5, and further restored in 2009, it remains one of the pleasantest of Birmingham’s shopping experiences.

Even if you dislike shopping and shops, one of the great pleasures of central Birmingham is the Victorian Restaurant [http://www.greatwesternarcade.co.uk/shop-detail.php?ID=15] in the Great Western Arcade – an ideal place for breakfast, lunch or tea, preferably on the first floor, looking out on to the gallery and a glazed roof that could be Victorian, but isn’t.

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

Viaduct to nowhere

Duddeston Viaduct, Birmingham

Duddeston Viaduct, Birmingham

Almost every time I travel from Sheffield to Birmingham, the train pauses outside New Street Station to wait for a vacant platform.

Looking to the south, it’s possible to discern two railway viaducts, one carrying trains into Moor Street Station, from where they traverse a tunnel at right angles to the New Street lines under the city centre to Snow Hill Station.

There’s another viaduct that carries only bushes and small trees.

This is the 1,100-yard-long 58-arch Duddeston Viaduct, built by the Great Western Railway as a linking curve towards the old Curzon Street station that closed when New Street opened in 1852.

The companies operating into New Street, the London & North Western and the Midland railways, blocked the Great Western access to their old and new stations, and the Great Western instead built Snow Hill station and tunnel at great expense.

Duddeston Viaduct halted at the land-boundary and, though it still exists, has never been used to carry trains since it was built.

See http://warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrbg671.htm.

Update:  At last, it seems someone has found a use for the Duddeston Viaduct:  Birmingham set for New York City-style High Line park – BBC News.  The Manhattan High Line is well-known.  There are already British examples in Manchester and Leeds.

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

Exploring Sydney: The Rocks

Cadman's Cottage, The Rocks, Sydney, Australia

Cadman’s Cottage, The Rocks, Sydney, Australia

The historic heart of Sydney is the area between Circular Quay and the Harbour Bridge known as The Rocks, because of the soft sandstone ridge on which it stands.

Standing on the harbour front, it was always a rough, disreputable district, and after an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 the New South Wales Government took steps to flatten the entire area.  The interruptions of two world wars and the disruption of building the approaches to the Harbour Bridge in the 1920s meant that a substantial number of historic structures survived into the 1960s.

An energetic campaign by a residents’ group in the early 1970s secured the conservation of the Rocks area, and now it is a tourist magnet, especially interesting for the overlays of successive historic periods on the oldest colonised site in the whole of Australia.

Among the places to see is Cadman’s Cottage, named after John Cadman, one of the government coxswains, an English publican transported for stealing a horse.  It dates from 1816 and is the third oldest building in Sydney.

The history of The Rocks is well interpreted in The Rocks Discovery Museum [http://www.therocks.com/sydney-Things_To_Do-The_Rocks_Discovery_Museum.htm], set in an 1850s warehouse restored by the National Trust.

What must have been the roughest collection of pubs in Sydney is now a variegated succession of tourist honeypots – the Fortune of War (1828) [http://www.fortuneofwar.com.au], the Lord Nelson (1841) [http://www.lordnelsonbrewery.com], the Orient (1844)[http://www.orienthotel.com.au] and the Russell Hotel & Wine Bar (1887) [http://www.therussellwinebar.com.au] – among many others.

A good way to start a stay in Sydney is to have dinner in the open air at Circular Quay, watching the ferries come and go, and then to take your pick of the watering-holes along George Street towards the Harbour Bridge.

The big city seems far away, though actually it’s just over the hill.

Exploring Sydney: Museum of Sydney

Museum of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Museum of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

If you arrive in Sydney and want to understand its history, the best place to start is the Museum of Sydney, a modern complex at the base of a high-rise block immediately south of Circular Quay, designed by Richard Johnson of Denton Corker Marshall and opened in 1995.

It stands on the site of the original Government House, built in 1788 for Governor Arthur Phillip and occupied until 1846.  Some of the foundations and the outline of the building are visible, and within there’s a detailed model and a recreation of part of the façade.

On the forecourt of the Museum is a haunting sculpture by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley entitled ‘Edge of Trees’, marking the spot where the Gadigal natives must have observed the arrival of the First Fleet of colonists from England.

The three floors of exhibition space tell the story of the early settlers and their relationship with the indigenous population.  There are models of the eleven ships of the First Fleet, and displays about the nine Governors who resided on the site, other important figures in the early history of the city, and a video montage Eora [“people”], by Aboriginal filmmaker Michael Riley, highlighting the life of Sydney people of indigenous descent back to the time of their dreaming.

Details of visiting times, and an online guidebook, are at http://www.hht.net.au/museums/mos.