Crossing the Clifton Gorge

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Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol

Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol

The first high-level crossing of the Avon Gorge at Bristol was not, in fact, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s suspension bridge, but a wrought-iron bar, installed in 1836 when bridge-building was about to begin, a thousand feet long and 1½ inches thick, suspended two hundred feet above the River Avon, to carry a basket for transporting materials hung from a roller.

Brunel made the first trip across (after his newly-wed wife, Mary Elizabeth Horsley, declined the opportunity) and got stuck halfway when the bar dipped.  He shinned up the suspension ropes to free the pulley and reached the opposite bank without further difficulty.

By 1843, with £45,500 spent, only the piers had been completed, linked by the single iron bar:  work stopped – to Brunel’s lifelong disappointment – and the unused suspension chains were sold and incorporated in his railway bridge across the Tamar at Saltash.

L T C Rolt, in his biography Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1957;  revised edition with an introduction by Angus Buchanan 1990), reports that when construction of the bridge stopped for lack of funds, the Clifton Bridge Company collected £125 in fares from members of the public who wished to ride across in the bucket.

The bridge as we know it was completed, to a variant of Brunel’s original design, in 1864 using the chains from another of his suspension bridges, across the River Thames at Hungerford.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Gothic New Zealand: Nelson

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Christ Church Cathedral, Nelson: west front

Christ Church Cathedral, Nelson: west front

It would be good to think that Christ Church Cathedral, Nelson, on New Zealand’s South Island, was a work in progress.  Its frankly odd appearance is a result of its history:  it reached its current shape and style through earthquake, fire and not a little controversy.

In 1842, within a year of the establishment of what became the town of Nelson, Bishop George Selwyn arrived with a tent which he planted at the top of what is now called Church Hill.  He returned in 1851 to dedicate the replacement wooden church as Christ Church [see http://find.natlib.govt.nz/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=TF&docId=nlnz_tapuhi670250].

This structure was enlarged and altered in 1859, 1866 and again when it was inaugurated as a cathedral in 1887.  The spire was damaged by an earthquake in 1893 and the tower demolished as unsafe in 1921, shortly before the building was further damaged by fire.

In 1927 an ambitious new stone Gothic cathedral was begun to the designs of Frank Peck (1863-1931), a British architect trained by Sir Aston Webb.  (One of Peck’s British designs, before he emigrated to New Zealand in 1915, was the furniture-heiress Grace Maple’s residence, Petwood at Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire.)

Peck’s design would have looked magnificent [http://photonews.org.nz/nelson/issue/NPN76_19670304/fig-NPN76_19670304_053b.html], but hardly had work begun than the Murchison earthquake of 1929 led to tighter building regulations, and construction came to a halt in 1932.

The result was that Peck’s nave stopped abruptly at clerestory level:  a temporary roof was installed, and the surviving wooden chancel from the previous church was attached to the east end.

A simplified design of 1954 by Ron Muston brought a sense of closure and practicality to the interrupted design.  Muston used reinforced concrete, faced with ground marble, to complement Peck’s marble blocks.

The dominant feature is the tower, a tall, spare essay in lightweight Gothic, much more adventurous than Peck’s orthodox Gothic Revival design.

Not everyone liked it.  The Nelson Evening Mail grumbled, “We are apparently to be satisfied with the second best.”

The cathedral was completed in 1967 and consecrated, once it became clear of debt, in 1972.

Of course, it doesn’t look complete.  Peck’s cathedral proved to be unbuildable on its tectonically vulnerable site.

But perhaps one day it might be possible at least to complete the nave.  Some medieval cathedrals stood incomplete for centuries:  Cologne, paused in 1473, was finished in 1880;  Bristol, interrupted at the Reformation, was eventually completed in 1888;  the first stone of Milan Cathedral was laid in 1386 and construction ended in 1965.

Never say never.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

Christ Church Cathedral, Nelson, New Zealand: tower

Christ Church Cathedral, Nelson, New Zealand: tower

The Top of the South

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Queen Charlotte Sound, South Island, New Zealand

Queen Charlotte Sound, South Island, New Zealand

One of the finest ferry journeys in the world is the 70-kilometre Interislander voyage across New Zealand’s 24-kilometre wide Cook Strait, between the south of the North Island and the north of the South Island.  The three-hour trip takes so long because it involves sailing in or out of Wellington Harbour and penetrating the drowned valleys of the Marlborough Sounds.  There’s a detailed history of the Cook Strait ferries at http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/cook-strait-ferries.

It’s a fine, relaxing journey – as long as you’re a passenger, and not responsible for steering the ship.  The Cook Strait is notoriously rough and unpredictable, with particularly weird tidal surges:  http://www.niwa.co.nz/sites/default/files/images/imported/0011/43004/cookmov_2.gif.

The vessel, MV Kaitaki, felt oddly familiar.  It turned out to be a former Irish Ferry, originally built in 1995 for the Holyhead-Dublin route:  originally the MV Isle of Innisfree, it was latterly P&O’s MV Challenger, operating between Portsmouth and Bilbao.  ‘Kaitaki’ is the Maori word for ‘challenger’.

The other two vessels on the Interislander service, DEVs Arahura and Aratere, are rail-capable, purpose-built as the physical link between the railway systems on the two islands.

Though none of the ferries transport passenger rail vehicles, they make it possible to travel all the way from Auckland to Christchurch by surface public transport, using the Overlander, the Interislander ferry and the Coastal Pacific train [see http://www.seat61.com/NewZealand.htm].

Indeed, when I return to New Zealand at leisure I plan to use that route and then the TranzAlpine to reach the west coast of the South Island at Greymouth.

The errand that took me on the Interislander was a lecture for the Nelson Decorative & Fine Arts Society at the Suter Art Gallery [http://thesuter.org.nz/visitus.aspx].

While I was in Nelson my host, Ainslie Riddoch, and her colleagues gave me snapper for lunch at the Boat Shed Café [http://www.boatshedcafe.co.nz] and dinner at Harry’s Bar [http://www.harrysnelson.co.nz], where we admired the waiter’s sang froid in serving a ménage à trois in the far corner.  Ménage à trois is not, I’m assured, usually on the menu.

Ainslie’s husband, Hamish, told me about the holiday potential of the “Top of the South”, in particular, the tiny settlement of Collingwood, named – like Nelson and Wellington – after a British hero of the French wars a generation earlier.

During the 1850s gold rush there was a serious suggestion that Collingwood should be designated the capital of New Zealand.  Now it’s where tourists go to experience wide-open spaces, with curious outliers of history such as the Collingwood Cemetery (1857) and St Cuthbert’s Church (1873):  http://www.farewellspit.com/collingwood-new-zealand.html.

I’m fascinated by remote places that time passed by, so I will return to the Top of the South.

Wainsgate Baptist Church

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Wainsgate Baptist Church, Old Town, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Wainsgate Baptist Church, Old Town, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Visitors to Hebden Bridge often find their way to the older hilltop town of Heptonstall, but few find their way to the other hilltop settlement on the opposite side of the valley of the Hebden Water – Old Town.

Up the hill above Old Town stands the Wainsgate Baptist Church, founded by the Particular Baptists c1750.

The second minister, Rev John Fawcett (1740-1817), had packed up ready to move to a better-placed ministry in London, when the distress of his Yorkshire congregation at losing him made him change his mind and remain in Hebden Bridge for the rest of his life.  He used this experience when he wrote the great nonconformist hymn, ‘Blest be the tie that binds’.

The present church dates from 1859-60, a typically robust, elegant classical, galleried chapel, expensively embellished at the end of the nineteenth century.

It’s hard to imagine how the houses scattered along the hillside could fill the chapel and the Sunday school – and the graveyard – year in, year out, but they did.

This fine Grade II* listed building was taken over by the Historic Chapels Trust after it closed in 2001 [http://www.hct.org.uk/chapels/yorkshire/wainsgate-baptist-church/21], and it’s now used as a venue for musical events.

To see what’s on, go to http://wainsgate.co.uk.  It’s worth turning up in good time to be sure of a parking place.

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Regent’s Canal

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Camden Lock, Regent's Canal, London

Camden Lock, Regent’s Canal, London

enjoy themselves in the industrial-picturesque surroundings of the Regent’s Canal, within a short bus- or tube-ride of central London.

On my last visit I spent an unseasonably warm spring lunchtime with my mate Ants at Camden Lock, eating and drinking and gazing across the water outside the Ice Wharf http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/the-ice-wharf.

There’s much more to the scene than meets the eye.

The Regent’s Canal was originally the early nineteenth-century version of the M25, built by a consortium that included the canny architect John Nash (1752-1835), who had the ear of the Prince Regent, later King George IV, and who made the most of his royal patronage to devise a master plan for a swathe of central London that runs from St James’s Park via Regent Street to Regent’s Park.

The practical purpose of the canal was to link the Grand Junction Canal at Paddington Basin with the London docks at Limehouse.  It was begun in 1812, completed as far east as Camden Town by 1816 and fully opened in 1820.

In fact, most of its traffic came from the docks:  it was more used as an artery to deliver freight around north London than to convey traffic to the Midlands canals.

Boats floating through Regent’s Park were an embellishment rather than intrusion:  indeed, repeated attempts to turn the canal into a railway through the nineteenth century invariably came to grief.

In between the First and Second World Wars, the Regent’s Canal amalgamated with connecting waterways through the Midlands as the Grand Union Canal, a brave and partially successful attempt to revive water transport as a bulk carrier.

Since 1945, commercial traffic has given place to pleasure cruising, encouraged by recognition of the amenity value of canalside homes and leisure facilities, and the growth of some of the finest market-shopping opportunities in the capital.

Latterly, it has proved invaluable for an entirely different purpose:  since 1979 trunk cables have carried electricity at 400KV, cooled by canal water, buried beneath the towpath.

John Nash and his chief engineer, James Morgan, would be astonished.

 

Great Great Britain

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SS Great Britain, Bristol

SS Great Britain, Bristol

Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s steamship Great Britain carries an immense cargo of stories.

Brunel remarked to the directors planning to build the Great Western Railway, “Why not make it [the GWR] longer and have a steamboat to go from Bristol to New York and call it the Great Western?”

The Great Western duly made its maiden voyage to New York in 1838, by which time the Great Western Railway reached out from London only as far as Maidenhead.

The Great Britain was his second steamship – the first iron-hulled, propeller-driven transatlantic steamship, at the time of her launch the largest ship in the world, the first ship ever to be photographed (by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1844).

She was floated for the first time on July 19th 1843, and ultimately returned to rest in the purpose-built dry dock in which she was constructed on July 19th 1970.  The launch was observed by the Prince Consort, and the return to Bristol by Prince Philip, the consort of the reigning Queen Elizabeth II.

During her active life she served as a troop ship during the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War, and carried the first England cricket team ever to visit Australia in 1861 – an event that produced the first sponsored sporting tournament, the first cricket test match, and the first hat trick.

Her career had more than its fair share of cock-ups.  Brunel, the great risk-taker, repeatedly modified the design during construction – changing from a wooden to an iron hull, extending the dimensions five times and scrapping the half-completed engine and building a new one in order to switch from paddle- to screw-propulsion.

The completed vessel stuck in the lock on departure from Bristol, ran aground in Ireland because of navigational errors, and went through repeated modifications to the engines, propeller and auxiliary rigging.  Eventually, SS Great Britain gained a reputation for reliability shipping migrants from England to Australia.

She ended up as a sailing collier, and finally acted as a floating coal-bunker in the Falkland Islands, where she was eventually beached at Sparrow Cove.

Her rescue, promoted against huge odds by a group led by Richard Goold-Adams and Ewan Corlett and largely financed by Sir Jack Hayward and Sir Paul Getty, is itself one of the great stories of the sea, and her return to Bristol, sailing under Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, one of the memorable moments of many people’s lifetimes.

Though she arrived in Bristol as a rusting hulk, she is now vividly restored.  Wandering among her elegant saloons and cramped cabins brings to life the life-changing experiences of Victorian voyagers.  The only omission, fortunately, is that she doesn’t make anyone seasick.

Nevertheless, I noticed how one particular mannequin, a sad lady in black, sat alone in the dining saloon, repeatedly attracted the sympathetic curiosity of young children.  Her silence and their attention says all that’s needed about the cost of emigration – and the power of imaginative curating.

Read the story at http://www.ssgreatbritain.org/story.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Footprints on the phantom dance-floor

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Former Lewis's department store, Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester (2009)

Former Lewis’s department store, Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester (2009)

It amuses me when highly respectable historical and amenity societies report the activities of urban explorers.

Those risk-taking, law-bending, under-the-wire investigators of derelict and inaccessible structures are distinguished by their principles – “take nothing but photographs;  leave nothing but footprints” – and the quality of their photography.

They must be a great annoyance to property-owners who would prefer their empty and neglected spaces to remain unvisited and to become forgotten.

For conservationists and architectural historians, however, it’s very useful to have assiduous and athletic enthusiasts reporting on the web the current condition of endangered sites of heritage importance.

I repeatedly visit Manchester, and yet hadn’t given a second glance to the Primark store in Piccadilly.  It was originally Lewis’s, described by Clare Hartwell in the Pevsner Architectural Guide, Manchester, as “a huge untidy Baroque pile” built by J W Beaumont & Sons in 1915 and extended by the same architects in 1929.

Clare Hartwell says it was the biggest department store in the provinces when it was built.  Lewis’s stores aspired to bring the splendour of London department stores to the major provincial cities [see Losing a Liverpool legend:  Lewis’s department store].

The Primark chain only uses the lower floors of the Manchester building, and above the snowline lies a sleeping treasure – Lewis’s ballroom:  http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=68769.

 

Honest John’s memorial

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Unitarian Church, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Unitarian Church, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Todmorden Unitarian Church (1864-9) is a highly unusual piece of nonconformist architecture, designed and built as a splendid recreation of a fourteenth-century Gothic church, with a spire 192 feet high and internal arrangements which – but for the absence of an altar – are largely Anglican in layout and design.

It has an elaborate font and pulpit, a William Hill organ originally powered by a water-powered air pump, and very fine stained glass by the Belgian designer, Jean-Baptiste Capronnier.  The tower contains a clock, carillon and a ring of eight bells hung for change-ringing.  The final cost amounted to £35,000, almost six times the initial estimate.

It was paid for by the Fielden brothers, Samuel, Joshua and John, as a memorial to their father, “Honest John” Fielden (1784-1849) by John Gibson, who also built Todmorden Town Hall and John Jnr’s residence, Dobroyd Castle, overlooking the town and the Unitarian Church.

John Gibson (1814–1892) is an under-rated architect, otherwise best known for his “Marble Church”, St Margaret’s, Bodelwyddan, in Denbighshire.

William Gaskell, the widower of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and the respected minister of Cross Street Chapel in Manchester gave the address in the inaugural service.  He suggested that it was entirely proper to enlist art to serve religious observance – if it was done sincerely.

The Fieldens transferred ownership to a trust in 1882, and inevitably over the years the available income became increasingly unequal to the costs of maintaining the structure.

After a centenary refurbishment, the building became increasingly impractical, and in 1987 the diminished congregation moved down to the lodge at the bottom of the drive.  The decaying and increasingly vandalised Grade I listed church was taken over by the Historic Chapels Trust in 1994 and is now cared for by local volunteers:  http://todunitarianchurch.caldercats.com/index.html.

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

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Honest John and his sons

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Dobroyd Castle, West Yorkshire (2007)

Dobroyd Castle, West Yorkshire (2007)

The Pennine border-town of Todmorden is founded on the acumen and discipline of the Fielden family, and particularly “Honest John” Fielden (1784-1849).  The son of a clothier, he built up the Fielden Brothers’ cotton-spinning business and pursued an energetic political career as MP for Oldham alongside William Cobbett.  As a successful millowner, he argued a powerful case for an eight-hour day, saying that shorter working days would equally benefit factory-owners and workers by restricting production and thereby increasing prices and wages.

He also founded the first Unitarian church in Todmorden, and served as its Sunday School superintendent, exerting a “severe and wholesome discipline”.

He handed on the business, first to his brother Thomas (1790-1869), and then to his three sons, Samuel (1816-1889), John (1822-1893) and Joshua Fielden (1827-1887).

Fielden Brothers became an extremely powerful business, employing at its peak two thousand workers with, in addition to the Todmorden mills, trading offices in Manchester, Liverpool, London and New York.  In the period 1850-65 it generated net profits of around £1.2 million.  During the cotton famine of 1861-5, Fieldens paid half wages to their unemployed workers for road-building and other public works.

Of the three, Joshua was the most prominent.  He became a Conservative MP, retired from the business in 1869 and bought Nutfield Park, Surrey.  There and on his yacht, Zingara, he lived an opulent lifestyle, particularly after giving up his parliamentary seat in 1880.  He died at Cannes, and was brought back to Todmorden for burial:  despite his expensive tastes he left an estate of half a million pounds.

John Jnr lived a quite different lifestyle.  He chose as his wife a mill-girl called Ruth, for whom he built Dobroyd Castle, designed by John Gibson and completed in 1869 at a cost of £71,589.  This sombre, domineering pile on a hill high above the town remained in family ownership until 1942, when it became a Home Office approved school for boys and later an independent boarding school for boys with emotional and behavioural difficulties.

In 1995 it was purchased for £320,000 by the New Kadampa Buddhist Tradition and opened as the Losang Dragpa Centre for meditational retreats.  The Buddhists peremptorily moved out in August 2007, and the Castle reopened as an outdoor pursuits centre, operated by Robinwood Activity Centres [http://www.robinwood.co.uk/activitycentres/dobroydcastle], in March 2009.

Dobroyd Castle is not open to the public.

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Border town

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Town Hall, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Town Hall, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Todmorden is essentially a border town.  The River Calder was the historic border between Yorkshire and Lancashire until 1888, since when the town has been in the West Riding and latterly West Yorkshire.

It’s not a big place, and its centre is dominated by the grandiose Town Hall financed by the three cotton-spinning Fielden brothers, Samuel, Joshua and John, and designed by their favourite architect John Gibson as a magnificent Roman temple on the lines of Birmingham Town Hall and St George’s Hall, Bradford.  It cost of £54,000.

The pediment of the south façade contains two carved female figures, the left-hand, western one symbolising cotton-spinning Lancashire, while the other represents the agriculture and engineering of Yorkshire.

The Town Hall actually straddles the River Calder which runs in a culvert underneath.  Before the boundary-change of 1888 it was possible to dance in the main hall from one county to the other and back again.

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.