Category Archives: Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry

Reginald – and Reg

Blackpool Tower Ballroom

Blackpool Tower Ballroom

U3A in Sheffield has an admirable Lunch & Lecture event twice a year, and I was invited recently to be the “turn” with my lecture Fun Palaces:  the history & architecture of the entertainment industry which, inevitably, includes a segment on Blackpool Tower.

At the end of the lecture a gentleman came over and discreetly pointed out that I should not refer to the Tower’s most famous organist as “Reg” Dixon.  To Blackpool people, he was and is always Reginald Dixon.  In future, I mean to get that right.

As it happens, Reginald Dixon was born and bred in Sheffield.  He learnt to play at the Cemetery Road Congregational Church on the southern edge of town, and worked as a professional organist at, among other cinemas, the Heeley Palace, where he had to keep an eye on the level of the River Sheaf as it flowed past the building, in case it threatened to flood the orchestra pit.

When he applied for the vacant post as organist at the Tower, he bluffed in saying he could play dance music, but his idiosyncratic style proved ideal for the demands of accompanying ballroom dancers, rather than silent movies, on an orchestral organ.  His contract began in March 1930;  he made his first radio broadcast a month later, and by 1933 was able to persuade the Tower Company to install a completely new, three-manual, thirteen-rank Wurlitzer with a carillon and an additional piano.  The original Tower Wurlitzer was transferred to the Empress Ballroom in the Winter Gardens.

Reginald Dixon became one of the most potent of Blackpool’s legends.  He is famed for ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’, but when he reinaugurated the Wurlitzer after the 1956 fire he began with the first tune he ever played in the Ballroom, ‘Happy days are here again’.  He made a point of accompanying Christmas concerts and performances of Handel’s Messiah on the Wurlitzer.  He switched on the Illuminations in 1956 and was awarded the MBE in 1966:  he played his final concert at the Tower on Easter Sunday 1970.  He died, aged eighty, in 1985.

Actually, there was a Reg Dixon also.  He was born in Coventry in 1915, and died in 1984.  He was a comedian popular in the 1940s and 1950s, the closing years of variety. His catch-phrase was “I’m not well.  I’m proper poorly.”  There is interview-footage of him at http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=78574 and further footage at http://deanocity3.piczo.com/coventrystvandradiopersonalities?cr=5&linkvar=000044.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

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.

No additives

White Wells, Ilkley, West Yorkshire

The White Wells spring on the moorland above Ilkley was never a sophisticated resort.  The facilities are even today rudimentary, and it’s a stiff climb up the hill from the town.

Asses provided transport for patients who were too weak to walk up to the well.  A guidebook of 1829 indicates the rigours involved in seeking a cure:

Patience is a virtue which will every day be called into action here;  the best time for getting a bath soon after going to the wells, is between five and eight in the morning.  It is extremely unpleasant to be at the wells during a storm or heavy shower, as the hill is made so slippery, that in going down a person may think himself extremely fortunate, should he arrive at home, without a fall or two, not to mention the pleasure of riding, ie, sliding half way down the hill.

The White Well is first mentioned c1710, and was actively promoted for the first time by Dr Thomas Short in his Natural, Experimental and Medicinal History of the Mineral Waters of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire &c (1734).  This was a masterpiece of marketing:

…this water is of the greatest esteem and repute of any of the north of England, in the King’s Evil [scrofula] and other old ulcers;  yet it derives these effects neither from its fixt nor volatile parts, but wholly from the coldness and the purity of the elements, its drying nature from the lime-stone it washes, tho’ a great part of it comes from blue clay.

In other words, this mineral water has nothing in it at all.  That’s why it does you good.

Ingenious.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on spas and holiday resorts, please click here.

Educating Archie

Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

One of the two finest places to have tea in Harrogate is the Old Swan Hotel http://www.classiclodges.co.uk/The_Old_Swan_Hotel_Harrogate.  (The other is the famous, and famously crowded, Betty’s http://www.bettys.co.uk.)

I took my cousin Cathryn and her family to the Old Swan when she received her Open University degree (thereby absolving me of being the only black sheep – that is, graduate – in the family).  We waded for above two hours through sandwiches, and cake, and scones, and pots of tea, and eventually admitted defeat.  It was wonderful.  I didn’t need to eat again till breakfast.

The Old Swan is also a relevant historic site because, although there was a hotel on the site in the eighteenth century, the present building is a fine example of a Victorian hydro, designed to offer the hugely popular “water cure”.  Built for the Harrogate Hydropathic Company in the late 1870s, the building is a conscious imitation of the even bigger Smedley’s Hydro at Matlock Bank.

Its major claim to fame, however, dates from 1926 when the crime novelist Agatha Christie (1890-1976) holed up at what was by then called the Swan Hotel for eleven days after her husband, Archie, declared he wanted a divorce so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele.

After a huge row he left their Berkshire house to spend the weekend with Nancy, and Agatha subsequently left, abandoned her Morris Cowley near Guildford and completely disappeared, as only a writer of murder mysteries can.

The ensuing search had elements of farce – the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, harassing the police for a “result”, Arthur Conan Doyle having one of Agatha’s gloves examined by a medium and Dorothy L Sayers inspecting the location of the abandoned car, later referenced in her novel Unnatural Death.

Eventually Agatha Christie was found, having an enjoyable time at the Swan, registered under the name Mrs Teresa Neele.

That gave Archie something to think about.

Archie and Agatha Christie divorced in 1928, and two years later she married the archaeologist (Sir) Max Mallowan (1904-1978). He once said that she said, “An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have;  the older she gets, the more interested he is in her,” but she denied it.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on spas and holiday resorts, please click here.

Don’t drink the water

Royal Pump Room, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Royal Pump Room, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Harrogate’s unique selling point as a spa is the sheer variety of its mineral springs.

The original spring that William Slingsby’s horse tripped over in 1571 was chalybeate, or iron-bearing:  this is now known as Tewit Well.  During the Thirty Year’s War, a “stinking well” at “old Haregate-head” was developed:  this Old Sulphur Well lies beneath the later Royal Pump Room which is now a museum [http://www.harrogate.gov.uk/immediacy-987].

Lady Elmes’ experience of the “nasty Spaw” and of her lodgings in 1665 suggests a degree of stoicism:

The first inst we arrived att the nasty Spaw, and have not began to drinke the horid sulfer watter, which all thowgh as bad as posable to be immajaned, yet in my judgment plesant, to all the doings we have within doorse, the house and all that is in it being horidly nasty and crowded up with all sorte of company, which we Eate with in a roome as the spiders are redy to drope into my mouthe, and sure hath nethor been well cleaned nor ared this doseuen yerese, it makes me much moare sicke than the nasty water.

Celia Fiennes, visiting in 1697, couldn’t persuade her horse to go anywhere near the sulphur well, yet considered the disgusting waters “a good sort of Purge if you can hold your breath so as to drinke them down”.

Traditionally, anyone is free to try the waters from a tap outside the Royal Pump Room.  Within the museum I have seen ladies behind a counter, bearing Mona Lisa smiles, prevailing on visitors to sample the water.

This is a characteristic Yorkshire welcome.

John Watson, former Conservative MP for Skipton & Ripon, told of one of his helpers, no doubt wearing his election rosette, calling at a pub between Skipton and Barnoldswick which advertised “A pie, a pint and a friendly word.”

The pie and a pint were served without a word.

“What about the friendly word?” he asked.

“Don’t eat the pie,” said the landlord.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on spas and holiday resorts, please click here.

Before Bloomingdales

Former Medinah Temple, Chicago (detail)

Former Medinah Temple, Chicago (detail)

My Isle of Man friend John, whose antennae can detect a pipe organ over astonishing distances, has pointed me to footage of the interior of the Medinah Temple, Chicago, dating from 2000, when the Austin Opus 558 organ was intact and playable:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-3tYSxN8LQ.

Perhaps Bloomingdales missed an opportunity when they stripped out this instrument to convert the building into a department store.

Macy’s in Philadelphia, the current owners of what was once Wanamaker’s, have retained and restored the gigantic pipe organ which John Wanamaker purchased from the St Louis World’s Fair of 1904.  Designed by the great organ designer George Ashdown Audsley, this exhibition instrument – the largest in the world with over 10,000 pipes – proved insufficient to fill the volume of the store’s seven-storey atrium.  Enlargements took place in 1910-1917 and again in 1924-1930, so that there are now 28,500 pipes, controlled by six manuals.

The Wanamaker Organ, as it is still named, is a much-loved part of Philadelphia life.  It figured in one of the Knight Foundation‘s Random Acts of Culture in which 600 choral singers, disguised as shoppers, led by the chorus of the Opera Company of Philadelphia, burst into an impromptu performance of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ to the astonishment and delight of ladies trying on shoes and having their make-up done: http://www.knightarts.org/uncategorized/what-a-joyful-noise-650-singers-burst-into-hallelujah-as-part-of-random-act-of-culture%e2%80%a8%e2%80%a8%e2%80%a8.

A video history of the Wanamaker Organ is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i_mG-qDzD8.

Enjoy.

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

 

Shrine for shoppers

 

Former Medinah Temple, Chicago

Former Medinah Temple, Chicago

The first couple of times I visited Chicago I stayed at the Cass Hotel on North Wabash Avenue – at that time an inexpensive, serviceable place to stay with a fluorescent-lit coffee-shop on the ground floor and a dark bar by the entrance.  Now it’s transformed into a boutique Holiday Inn Express:  http://www.casshotel.com/index.php.

On my first visit, in 2001, I was intrigued by the building on the next block, an exceptionally rich essay in Moorish Revival style, bristling with Islamic motifs, which I was told was the Medinah Temple – not in any sense a place of worship, but a Shriners’ temple.

The Shriners – properly entitled the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine – are virtually inexplicable to the British.  It’s akin to explaining Oddfellows to an American (though there is an American connection, the Odd Fellows).

The Shriners is a philanthropic organisation, responsible among much else for operating children’s hospitals.  The founders sought to combine Freemasonry with fun and fellowship, and their temples provided enormous auditoria in which huge fundraising entertainments could take place.

The Chicago Medinah Temple was a much-loved venue for circuses and graduations.  Built in 1912, it could seat 4,200, and because of its excellent acoustics and its huge five-manual organ it was regularly used as a recording studio by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Noël Coward, obliged to undergo an uncomfortable medical procedure in the nearby Passavant Hospital (now part of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital), was at first irritated by the noise of the massed bands of the Shriners marching to their temple, but later admitted that their rhythmic rendition of ‘Darktown Strutters’ Ball’ “helped a little, spasmodically”.

In 2000-3 the Medinah Temple’s exterior was restored, but the interior was stripped out, apart from the proscenium, the dome and some stained glass, to create a spectacular branch of Bloomingdale’s http://www1.bloomingdales.com/store/index.ognc?action=STORE_DETAIL&lstRegion=all&storeId=70001.

To find out more about the Shriners, visit http://www.shrinershq.org and http://www.shrinershq.org/Hospitals/Main.

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

 

 

Spirited enterprise

Gaumont Cinema, Dingle, Liverpool

Gaumont Cinema, Dingle, Liverpool

The Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin (September/October 2010) alerted me to activity at the Gaumont Cinema, Dingle, Liverpool – a huge Art Deco pile on the corner of Park Road and Dingle Lane that I’ve been driving past for years without ever having a chance to look inside.

It was designed by the Gaumont house-architect, W E Trent, assisted by Daniel Mackay, as a replacement for an earlier, smaller cinema called the Picturedrome.  It opened on Easter Monday 1937, seating 1,503, with a second-hand Wurlitzer organ (now in the care of the Lancastrian Theatre Organ Trust:  [http://www.voxlancastria.org.uk/heritage]) transferred from the Trocadero Cinema, Liverpool.

W E Trent excelled at simple, sweeping architectural effects, so the exterior has a vertically-banded centrepiece, originally neon-lit, and horizontal bands of stone and brick, curving round the street corner;  the interior is a calm essay in moderne stripped classical features intended to be highlighted by concealed lighting, probably with a range of colour-changes.  Small-scale live shows were provided for:  the proscenium is 45 feet wide, the stage 15 feet deep and there are four dressing rooms.

It operated as a cinema until 1966, and then became a Top Rank bingo-club until 1998.  Thereafter it stood empty until it was taken over for redevelopment as a cultural centre despite attacks from local vandals [http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2009/02/28/owners-hope-to-restore-former-gaumot-art-deco-cinema-in-liverpool-s-dingle-100252-23030627].

The Dingle Gaumont attracts more than vandals:  it has a reputation as the most haunted cinema for miles around.  The CTA Bulletin led me to a TV series I wouldn’t otherwise have come across, Most Haunted, with an over-the-top production-style that will strike viewers as gripping or hilarious depending on their views about the supernatural:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N08jo7kNqo&feature=fvw.  (More relaxed views of the interior can be found at http://www.urbexforums.co.uk/showthread.php/6799-Former-Gaumont-Cinema-Dingle-Liverpool-June-09.)

Because of its status as “one of the most haunted locations in the North West” it has now become a venue for ghost-hunters:  http://www.britevents.com/whats-on/merseyside/dingle/gaumont-cinema/74823.  Tickets cost £49, and you need to bring your own sandwiches.

Bingo kept the place going for decades.  It’s good to see a new way of gaining income from an old cinema.  And it’s an excellent way of deterring the vandals.

The Cinema Theatre Association website is at http://www.cinema-theatre.org.uk.

Images from a November 2011 urban explorer’s visit are at http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php/66021-Gaumont-Cinema-Dingle-Liverpool-November-2011.

Excellent undated images are at http://urbanliverpool.blogspot.co.uk/p/gaumont-cinema-dingle.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

 

End of the pier show

West Pier, Brighton (1980)

West Pier, Brighton (1980)

Two individuals have been arrested on a charge of arson in connection with the fire at Hastings Pier on October 5th 2010.  Of course, they’re innocent until proved guilty, but even if these two were uninvolved, arson is the likely cause of the fire.  Derelict seaside piers are not prone to spontaneous combustion.

The most spectacular example of such destruction is Brighton West Pier (1863-6), built – like Hastings –by the great Victorian pier engineer Eugenius Birch.  This most splendid of British piers, Grade I listed, was a location in Richard Attenborough’s film, Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).  It was partly closed the year after the film came out, and completely closed to the public in 1975.

Battles between owners who wanted to demolish it and Brighton residents who wanted to take it over and restore it continued until the Brighton West Pier Trust bought it for £10 in 1984.  Storm damage in 1987-8 isolated the concert hall and pavilion:  a temporary connection was eventually built in 1996 on the strength of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of just under a million pounds, which was followed two years later by the promise of over ten million pounds of funding for a full restoration.

Two successive devastating storms on December 29th 2002 and January 20th 2003 caused the central section of the pier and the concert hall to collapse.

On March 28th 2003 the isolated pavilion was destroyed by a fire.  On May 11th the same year what was left of the concert hall caught fire.  The following day that fire reignited.  On June 23rd 2004 the remaining shell of the central section blew down in a gale.

The West Pier Trust was eventually compelled to give up hope of restoring what was left of the pier, and turned their attention to building a 150-metre observation tower, I360, on the site.  The current intention is to complete this structure by the summer of 2015:  http://www.westpier.co.uk/the-future.

The sad vestige of the pavilion has an elegance of its own, and Flickr is awash with superb photographs of its outline against the sea and the sky [http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=brighton+west+pier].  There is also a poignant documentary of 2003 by Hannah James:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egikqrDRcww

The most exciting and evocative e-experience of the West Pier, however, is a virtual tour by the Brighton-based F10 studios:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rtkWdauc5E.

Pure magic.

A further stage in the inevitable disappearance of the remains of the West Pier is chronicled at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-26046379

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.

 

Bringing the house down

Hippodrome Theatre, Derby (1993)

Hippodrome Theatre, Derby (1993)

The last two articles [Hug the Odeon and Hug another Odeon] have highlighted auditoria that are intact (just), architecturally valuable, unlisted and in danger of demolition.

Listing a building doesn’t, of course, automatically guarantee its security.  The Hippodrome Theatre, Derby is a notorious example of what can happen to a supposedly protected building.

In this case, the owner, Mr Christopher Anthony, under the pretext of making repairs, managed to remove the stage area and much of the roof.  The delicacy with which this was accomplished can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS5UOSz2dBg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YlUJUyLcMk&feature=related.  This followed an earlier arson attack which, by means which are unclear, destroyed plasterwork around the dress circle and the proscenium arch.

Derby City Council, supported by such organisations as English Heritage, Derby Civic Society, the Theatres Trust and the Cinema Theatre Association, has pursued Mr Anthony through legal action, not only for the damage caused to the previously intact building but also by rejecting his application to turn the site into, of all things, a multi-storey car-park.

Why does this matter?  Leaving aside the civic and legal arguments about the significance and effectiveness of listed-building legislation, the Hippodrome had, and still has, historical and architectural value.  It was built in 1914, right at the end of the great late-Victorian and Edwardian boom in building variety theatres.  It is the only known surviving example of the work of the Scottish architects, Charles T Marshall & William Tweedy.  Though it was adapted as a cinema in 1930, it returned to theatre use from 1950 to 1959;  it operated as a bingo club from 1962 until it abruptly closed in 2007.

As a result of this history it was very little altered.  I took groups to visit it, by courtesy of Walkers Bingo, repeatedly during the 1980s and 1990s.  The auditorium, stage-tower and grid were intact.  At some time in the early 1990s the auditorium was redecorated and the seating reupholstered.

Bingo kept the roof on and the building warm for decades.  There were even occasional Christmas shows on the stage.  Derby is not well blessed with auditoria, and can ill afford to lose this one.

Indeed, the city is rather better provided with multi-storey car-parks.

The rallying-point for those who wish to see the Hippodrome somehow restored is the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust, whose website is http://www.derbyhippodrome.co.uk.  The Theatres Trust website has a detailed architectural description: http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/118-hippodrome-derby.

Update:  I’ve left the text of this article as I wrote it in October 2010, and add here the latest news in the sorry saga of the Derby Hippodrome:  Theatre at Risk Derby Hippodrome demolished.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

Hug another Odeon

Former Paramount Cinema, Manchester (1996)

Former Paramount Cinema, Manchester (1996)

The New Victoria Cinema (latterly the Odeon), Bradford stands mouldering because its owners have pointedly neglected it for ten years and English Heritage has seen insufficient evidence to list it and secure its survival.

The Paramount Cinema, Oxford Street, Manchester, which finally closed in 2004, is in an even worse state.

Like the New Victoria, Bradford, it was opened in 1930 – in this case the very first Paramount cinema in the British provinces.  Designed by the Paramount house-architects, Frank T Verity and his son-in-law Sam Beverly, it seated 2,920 in an elaborate baroque auditorium with a Wurlitzer organ which survives in Stockport Town Hall.  Certainly it’s been knocked about a bit:  it was repeatedly subdivided in 1973, 1979 and 1992, and photographs show that the removal of the organ did no favours to the organ case.

The developers, Manchester & Metropolitan, carried out what they described as “limited and entirely lawful exposure works in anticipation of the forthcoming redevelopment”.  This involved ripping out easily accessible decorative features and discouraged English Heritage from listing, though a substantial amount of the original auditorium decoration remained.

The parallels with Bradford are instructive.  A hopelessly large auditorium is subdivided in the 1960s to maintain its commercial viability;  by the end of the twentieth century the game is up and redevelopment is seen as the answer.  Finding a creative solution to preserve such a building is understandably off the developer’s script while its true architectural and historical significance is hidden.

Yet both these erstwhile Odeons stand within a potentially lucrative cultural quarter.  The Bradford building is next to the Alhambra Theatre and is within sight of the National Media Museum.  The Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin (September/October 2010) suggests that the Manchester Odeon could have had a future use as a supplementary conference venue alongside Manchester Central, the former G-Mex.

Alternatively, the building next door is a J D Wetherspoon’s pub – called, suggestively, the Paramount.

Probably the last urban-explorer images of the Paramount, taken shortly before demolition started in January 2017), are at Report – – ODEON Cinema (Oxford Street), Manchester – July 2016 | Theatres and Cinemas | 28DaysLater.co.uk and Report – – Odeon / Paramount Cinema, Manchester, July 2016 | Theatres and Cinemas | 28DaysLater.co.uk.

For an up-to-date article about what eventually happened to the New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, go to Bradford Live | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.