Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

The Royal Tuschinski Theatre

**Royal Tuschinski Theatre**, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abraham Icek Tuschinski (1886-1942) was the founder and creator of one of the world’s finest cinemas, the Royal Tuschinski Theatre [Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski] in Amsterdam.

Tuschinski was born to Polish parents in 1886, and after he married in his late teens he decided to take his new wife, Mariem Ehrlich, to a new life away from the antisemitism of their native country.

He settled in Rotterdam and over a period of thirteen years established four cinemas in the city, each more elaborate than its predecessor.

At the end of the First World War he made a partnership with two brothers-in-law, Hermann Gerschtanowitz and Hermann Ehrlich, and bought land on Amsterdam’s Reguliersbreestraat near the Rembrandtplein square.

Construction began in June 1919 and the cinema opened on October 28th 1921. The initial designer was Hijman Louis de Jong (1882-1944), who was dismissed before the building was completed: the interiors were finished by Pieter den Besten (1894-1972) and Jaap Gidding (1887-1955)

Art historians variously describe the styles employed as Jugendstil (otherwise Art Nouveau) and Art Deco (though the term didn’t become current until after the 1925 exhibition Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes). A useful umbrella term is the Amsterdam School. A practical adjective would be “exotic”.

Tuschinski wanted his patrons, when they stepped into the foyer, to feel they’d entered an illusion. The auditorium resembled an opera house, with two balconies above the stalls. Private spaces included a cabaret named La Gaité, a Japanese tearoom and a Moorish suite. A modern heating and ventilation system guaranteed comfort at all seasons, and after a refurbishment in 1936 the new carpet had two-inch pile. The building boasted the first organ in a Dutch cinema: Wurltizer couldn’t deliver in time, and Tuschinski grabbed a second-hand alternative from a cinema in Brussels.

There is a magnificent collection of archive photographs of the theatre’s early days together with modern images by Isabel Bronts at Cinema of Dreams: The Inspiring Story of Amsterdam’s Tuschinski Theate – Cabana Magazine.

The Tuschinski Theatre cost four million guilders and quickly became celebrated. Abraham Tuschinski was awarded Dutch citizenship in 1926, but the splendour went sour as war approached.

When the Nazi troops invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, four of Tuschinski’s cinemas in Rotterdam were destroyed. On Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday in August that year, British and Dutch flags appeared at a window at the Tuschniski. Abraham Tuschinksi declined an opportunity to escape to Britain, saying that he “grew up in this country in good times [and didn’t] want to be a deserter in bad times,” he said.

The three brothers-in-law were deprived of their business, and its Jewish name was changed to Tivoli by the Nazi-supported replacement owners, Tobis Film. Its programmes went over entirely to German films and performances by German artistes. A fire in the summer of 1941 destroyed some of the exquisite decoration.

Abraham Tuschinski was arrested on July 1st 1942 and sent first to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz where he was murdered on September 17th 1942. Only three members of the Tuschinski, Ehrlich and Gerschtanowitz families were still alive at the end of the war.

This was far from the end of the story, however. Max Gerschtanowitz took the business on after the war, and the cinema subsequently passed through successive owners until the French Pathé company acquired it as part of the MGM combine in 1995.

Pathé carried out painstaking restorations in 1998-2002 and again in 2019-20. Technical details of these restorations and much historical background can be found at Abraham Icek Tuschinski – Jewish Amsterdam and Pathé Tuschinski Cinema in Amsterdam | Amsterdam.info.

In 2021 King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands granted the complex the accolade “Royal” [Koninklijk]. Two grandsons of Hermann Gerschtanowitz and his great-grandson, the actor and TV personality Winston Gerschtanowitz, and a grandson of Hermann Ehrlich attended the ceremony.

Well-kept station

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Great Malvern railway station, Worcestershire

Great Malvern railway station was built as the arrival and departure point for the elite visitors who flocked to the district to take water cures in the mid-Victorian period.

The spa resort thrived from the arrival of the Worcester & Hereford Railway in 1860, and the station at Great Malvern, opened in 1862, was the major hub for visitors, local inhabitants and freight. There were two other less important stations, Malvern Link to the north and Malvern Wells (closed in 1965) to the south.

The character of the station, like the rest of the town, was heavily influenced by Lady Emily Foley (1805-1900), the widowed Lady of the Manor, whose late husband’s will gave her independence and considerable influence. She disliked travelling through the two tunnels on the line, at Ledbury and Colwall, so she habitually travelled by road between her country seat at Stoke Edith and her private waiting room at Great Malvern.

The Gothic buildings at Great Malvern station were built in local Malvern Rag stone and designed by a local architect, Edmund Wallace Elmslie. He was responsible for the road bridge at the north end of the platforms and the remarkable iron columns which support the canopies on both platforms. The beautifully restored and brightly painted capitals are in twelve different designs, hand-forged in wrought iron, and serve to direct rainwater down the interior of each column.

Edmund Wallace Elmslie at the same time designed the Imperial Hotel across Avenue Road from the station. It was the largest hotel in Malvern, owned by the Great Malvern Hotel Company, chaired by the hydrotherapy pioneer Dr James Manby Gully (1808-1883).

Its elaborate Gothic architecture is enlivened by carvings by the Worcester sculptor William Forsyth (c1834-1915), whose brother James created, among much else, the huge Perseus Fountain at Witley Court, Worcestershire.

In 1919 the hotel was bought for £32,500 by Miss Greenslade and Miss Poulton, the two founders of Malvern Girls’ College which dated from small beginnings in 1893 elsewhere in Malvern. A complex succession of amalgamations with Lawnside, The Abbey and St James’s School (all of which were founded by women) eventually created Malvern St James in 2006.

The hotel was directly connected with the station platform by a gently sloping covered passageway of brick, wood and corrugated iron which is known as The Worm, for reasons which are obvious when looking at it from the overbridge. It enabled guests with limited mobility to reach the hotel from the railway. There is a shorter underground goods tunnel north of passenger walkway.

There’s a regular train service to Great Malvern from Worcester and Hereford, and a bus-service up the hill to the town centre.

Lady Foley’s former private waiting room operated as Lady Foley’s Tea Room until it closed in October 2023.

Though there was a project in 2017 to restore The Worm, it’s currently inaccessible for safety reasons.

Water is best

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Rose Garrard, Malvhina drinking fountain, Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Great Malvern is a pleasant place. It’s populated by smart-looking ladies with Waitrose carrier bags and relaxed gents sitting around reading hardback books indoors or outdoors according to the weather. It’s long been a place to retire to, whether transitorily or permanently.

“Malvern” is a portmanteau placename for a cluster of small settlements – Great Malvern, Little Malvern, West Malvern, Malvern Wells and Malvern Link – all of which lie at the foot of the Malvern Hills ridge, where ancient Pre-Cambrian rocks provide prolific quantities of pure water from as many as 240 natural springs.

The name itself derives from Old Welsh, meaning “bald hill” and in modern Welsh rendered as moelfryn. This is associated with the name of a Gaelic goddess Malvhina, who was resurrected from obscurity by the local writer and photographer Charles Frederick Grindrod (1847-1910) and is commemorated by Rose Garrard’s 1998 fountain on Belle Vue Terrace.

Great Malvern grew up around the impressive eleventh-century Priory, of which the Perpendicular church survives because it was bought by the parishioners after the Dissolution. The only other remnant of the priory is the gatehouse, the home of the Malvern Museum of Local History.

Malvern water was esteemed from the seventeenth century, but was not widely known outside the local area. Dr John Wall (1708-1776) promoted it in a pamphlet entitled Experiments and observations on the Malvern Water (1756), which a critic summarised in an ironic couplet:

The Malvern water, says Doctor John Wall,
Is famed for containing just nothing at all.

We must remember that until the nineteenth century, pure water was a rarity. Most people drank small beer, cider or mead if they could get it. Tea, coffee and drinking chocolate were outlandish luxuries, accessible only to the very rich.

Gradually, through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, Malvern’s trade in its natural water grew.

The two most celebrated Malvern wells are St Ann’s Well which the Lady of the Manor, Lady Emily Foley (1805-1900) encouraged by extending the existing building in 1841 and, in Malvern Wells, the Holy Well which became the base for Schweppes’ bottling plant from 1850. Both these wells specifically made Malvern water available to local people.

The district was transformed by the arrival in 1842 of Dr James Wilson (1807-1867) and Dr James Manby Gully (1808-1883), leading exponents of hydrotherapy, the highly popular but ultimately controversial water treatment developed by Dr Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851) at Grafenburg, Silesia.

The pair set up clinics in Malvern (Holyrood House for women and Tudor House for men) and were joined by other practitioners to make the area famous.

The railway from Worcester to Malvern Link opened in 1859, and a succession of distinguished figures – among them Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale – visited and took away glowing recommendations of the benefits of taking the Malvern waters. Indeed, Malvern water has been preferred by British monarchs from Queen Elizabeth I to Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Victoria refused to travel without it.

Enthusiasm for being wrapped in wet blankets at the crack of dawn declined by the beginning of the twentieth century, but Malvern’s quiet charms remained attractive, and the hydros and large residences were easily converted to boarding schools, of which Malvern College (1862), Abbey College (1874) and Malvern St James (1893) remain in operation.

As an education centre, Malvern encouraged cultural activities. Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), who was born near Worcester and grew up in the city, spent much of his life in and around Malvern and Hereford: ELGAR – The Elgar Trail. Rose Gifford’s Elgar Fountain (2000) on Belle Vue Terrace incorporates a statue of the composer.

The Head of English at Malvern College, George Sayer (1914-2005), knew both C S Lewis (1898-1963) and J R R Tolkien (1892-1973). Lewis had been a student of George Sayer, who became his biographer, and he introduced his Oxford University colleague Tolkien to Sayer and to Malvern and its hills. C S Lewis is said to have been inspired to write the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by a snowy street lit by Great Malvern’s characteristic gas lamps.

Malvern is a healthy, comfortable place whether you’re growing towards adulthood or reaping the rewards of a working life, and in between it’s an admirable base for exploring a beautiful part of England, resonant with history and culture.

Note: The Malvern Museum of Local History is closed for refurbishment from November 2025 and is planned to reopen on March 28th 2026: Welcome to Malvern Museum – Malvern Museum of Local History.

Nottingham Playhouse

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When I visited Nottingham Playhouse recently to see my friend Andrea in a superlative production of Aaron Sorkin’s play based on Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird [To Kill A Mockingbird] I felt an immediate sense of nostalgia when I entered the auditorium.

When the Playhouse opened in 1963 I was in the middle of my grammar-school education and by the time we reached the sixth form the following year our English teachers had formed a rota to take us by coach once a month on a Friday evening to see whatever was on in the Playhouse’s opening seasons which were directed principally by John Neville (1925-2011).

Neville shared his role of artistic director at first with Frank Dunlop (b1927), who went on to found the Young Vic in 1969, and the polymathic Peter Ustinov (1921-2004). Between them they brought to Nottingham a broad range of classic drama and a scintillating troupe of talented actors.

Therefore, in our teens, we were privileged to see – live on stage – not only John Neville’s Richard II, Oedipus and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, but the twenty-something Judi Dench as Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s bawdy Restoration comedy The Country Wife, which had us rolling about in our front-row seats, even if some of us didn’t at first twig the pun in the title.

These opportunities were unrepeatable: Neville resigned in 1969 because the theatre’s grant was repeatedly frozen; nowadays theatre seat-prices are elevated beyond most school budgets, especially when big-name performers are cast. Indeed, Nottingham Playhouse runs a laudable 50:50 Appeal, which enables audiences to donate the cost of tickets for local people who otherwise wouldn’t experience live theatre: 50:50 Appeal – Nottingham Playhouse.

I’m pleased to see that Peter Moro’s theatre, with the circular drum of the auditorium prominent above the rectilinear outer shell, has been respectfully restored: Moro had been involved in the Royal Festival Hall project, and for Nottingham created a conventional proscenium theatre that encloses its audience so they share the same space as the actors.

And on the night I was there the To Kill a Mockingbird tour filled every seat in the house as it storms around the country on its way to a West End run in August 2026: TOUR — To Kill A Mockingbird.

Heinz Memorial Chapel

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The Philadelphia architect Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938) demonstrated how the Gothic architectural tradition could express the dignity and function of academic architecture in his Cathedral of Learning, completed in 1937 as part of the campus of the University of Pittsburgh.

Alongside the Cathedral in the same years he applied the same blend of historicism and modernity to design two other neo-Gothic structures for the University.

The Stephen Collins Foster Memorial (1937) provided two theatre spaces for the Department of Theatre Arts and accommodation for the Stephen Foster Memorial Museum and the Stephen Foster Collection and archive, which is regarded as particularly important because Foster’s brother Morrison Foster destroyed or dispersed many of his papers after his death. It houses the twelve-sided Stephen Foster Shrine, which displays the composer’s sheet music and memorabilia.

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is regarded as “the father of American music” as the composer of such minstrel songs as ‘Camptown Races’, ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’ and ‘Old Folks at Home’ (‘Swanee River’) – a mixed legacy, in which well-loved melodies are tied to lyrics that are now regarded as racially-inflected and widely disliked.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel (1938) was initially conceived by Henry John Heinz (1844-1919), the Pittsburgh-born founder of the food-processing company, as a memorial to his mother, but was extended after his death by additional bequests from his three surviving children.

It was gifted to the University and “dedicated to culture, understanding response to beauty, and religious worship” as an interdenominational place of worship which is open to all members of the University community, employees of the H J Heinz Company and the general public.

Unlike the Cathedral of Learning, a tower which reaches 535ft into the heavens, the Heinz Memorial Chapel is a traditional cruciform church with tall, narrow proportions, many Gothic arches and pinnacles, surmounted by a fleche 256 feet above ground level.

The interior is a series of lofty French Gothic vaults, decorated with elaborate sequences of sculpture by Joseph Gattoni, and drenched in daytime by the light of predominantly blue stained glass by the prominent stained-glass artist Charles Jay Connick (1875-1945), who was responsible for the entire sequence of the chapel’s many huge windows.

The proximity of three ambitious neo-Gothic buildings in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus is remarkable, memorable and leaves an indelible impression, particularly on those fortunate enough to come to the city of steel and heavy industry to study.

Cathedral of Learning

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Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA: Commons Room

The nineteenth-century Gothic Revival was influential in the USA and maintained momentum until the Second World War.

Nineteenth-century Gothic buildings were usually scholarly versions of European originals, like New York City’s Trinity Church (1846) and St Patrick’s Cathedral (1879/1888).

Subsequent neo-Gothic buildings in the States are more varied, grand and original, especially when their designs merged with the quintessentially American invention of the skyscraper.

I’ve been fortunate to enjoy the Woolworth Building (1913) and Riverside Church (1929) in New York City, Grace Cathedral (1924-64) in San Francisco and the Tribune Tower (1922-25) in Chicago, but the richest, most fascinating, downright peculiar example of American Gothic I know is the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh.

This astonishing structure is a 42-storey tower containing lecture facilities, research and library areas and study and social facilities for the University of Pittsburgh. Its construction took from 1926 to 1937.

It was the brain-child of John Gabbert Bowman (1877-1962), chancellor of the university 1921-45, who envisaged a landmark building dominating the city: “…more than a schoolhouse; it was to be a symbol of the life that Pittsburgh through the years had wanted to live”.

He commissioned Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938), one of the foremost American architects of his generation who continued to develop the neo-Gothic style in the age of Art Deco.

On land given by the banker and industrialist Andrew William Mellon (1855-1937), Charles Klauder created a monumental building that fulfilled all the requisite criteria – ample space for a multiplicity of purposes, a powerful impact on the Pittsburgh townscape and a rich source of imaginative art and craftsmanship.

The most awe-inspiring space in the Cathedral is the four-storey Commons [sic] Room, 52 feet high and covering half an acre of floor-space, where students are guaranteed quiet for private study. The Perpendicular Gothic columns and vaults are functioning masonry arches, independent of the steel frame which supports the higher storeys.

The first and third floors surrounding the Commons Room are largely given over to the Nationality Rooms that John G Bowman handed over in 1926 to representatives of the nationalities that made up Pittsburgh’s diverse communities. Each community was responsible for the entire cost of fitting out the rooms, after which the University undertook to maintain them in perpetuity.

The English Room, for example, is decorated with materials rescued from the bombed House of Commons at the end of the Second World War. It was dedicated in 1952, and contains portraits of Andrew Mellon and William Pitt, the Prime Minster after whom the city is named. Separate classrooms are dedicated to Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Turkish Room includes a large ceramic portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, instructing his people about the Turkish alphabet introduced in 1928 in place of the Arabic script.

There are currently thirty-one Nationality Rooms, from African Heritage to Yugoslavia, of which all but two are functioning classrooms. Most of them still have blackboards, though the Korean Room, dedicated in 2015, was the first to instal an LED screen and central speaker system.

Detailed descriptions of all the Nationality Rooms can be found at Nationality Rooms – Wikipedia.

The highest level of the tower available to the public is the Federick Honors College on the 35th and 36th floors. The views are spectacular.

The Cathedral of Learning is freely accessible to members of the public. I ate chicken nuggets and fries in the student refectory in the basement. You can’t always do that at British cathedrals of learning.

Crown & Kettle

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Researching the history and architecture of public houses is a minefield. Documentation is widely scattered, images are variable in quality and often undated, and personal memories are often vague because they’re born of habit.

The Crown & Kettle on the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Oldham Road north of Manchester’s city centre has a coherent story that’s repeatedly told but some of the details are open to debate.

The name is unusual, but not as strange as the earlier name, the “Iron Dish & Cob of Coal”. Neither has been satisfactorily explained.

The earliest reference to a building on the site is dated 1734 and indicates it was used as a courthouse, and the connection with justice leads to unlikely tales of a secret tunnel to Strangeways Prison (built 1866-68) and “hanging pits” beneath the gents’ lavatory.

The eighteenth-century building isn’t the present-day two-storey pub. Neil Richardson’s The Old Pubs of Ancoats (2016) cites a directory of 1800 and includes an 1820 sketch of a three-storey, eighteenth-century building with a distinctive sign of a crown and a kettle.

The Manchester Evening News (August 26th 1976) mentions that the Crown & Kettle held a drinks licence by 1799. There are repeated newspaper advertisements for auctions on the premises from 1800 onwards.

Whatever its origins the current grand building with a high-ceilinged ground floor makes an excellent hostelry and has been a landmark for something like the better part of two centuries. Its interior is memorable for its elaborate Gothic plaster ceiling and the huge pendants which originally carried gasolier lighting fixtures.

Until the 1990s the snug had mahogany panelling which allegedly came from the R101 airship. This seems unlikely because the R101 was destroyed when it crashed and burst into flames near Beauvais, northern France, in October 1930 killing 48 passengers and crew. It’s possible that the panelling actually came from the R100, which was grounded and scrapped after the R101 tragedy.

In the mid-twentieth century the Crown & Kettle was a popular watering hole for journalists and printers from the Daily Express building next door. One history-forum contributor blamed the pub for the paper’s “speeling mistakes”. There’s a story that the Express photographer Jack Kay used to visit with his pet duck, which was teetotal and drank water from an ashtray.

The Crown & Kettle was listed Grade II in 1974. It was closed after an altercation on February 3rd 1990 between supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City that was variously described as a “fight”, a “riot” and “like the Wild West”, and according to the Manchester Evening News caused £30,000-worth of damage. Every member of staff on duty was injured.

A subsequent arson attack ruined the mahogany panelling in the snug.

It remained closed until 2005 when, with assistance from English Heritage, the ceiling was partly restored, leaving the remainder “as found”. After a change of ownership and a further refurbishment in 2000-2001 some of the interior walls were stripped back to the brickwork.

These vicissitudes have enhanced the atmosphere and appeal of the place. It was awarded the Greater Manchester CAMRA regional Pub of the Year 2015 and the Central Manchester Pub of the Year 2019.

The Crown & Kettle is a star in Manchester’s city-centre constellation of fine pubs. Its history is lengthy and robust, and loses nothing in the telling.

Roupell Street

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When I booked a weekend in London at the Premier Inn London Southwark (Southwark Station), my London-based friend Eric prompted me to seek out the Roupell Street estate as an unexpected historic experience.

It takes only a couple of minutes to walk into a nineteenth-century time-warp of neat little terraces that are now marketed as two-bedroom houses at close on two million pounds each.

The area was developed in the early nineteenth century by the son of a jeweller, John Palmer Roupell (1771-1835), an ambitious, indeed rapacious gold-refiner and metal merchant, who bought seven acres of land in Lambeth Marsh in 1792. The area was previously tenter grounds, used for drying new-made cloth, until John Palmer Roupell introduced iron and lead works and later, from 1824, laid out streets which were initially named after him and his wife and only son.

This was not a happy family. The son, Richard Palmer Roupell (1782-1856), feared his father, who he knew would disapprove of his liaison with a carpenter’s daughter, Sarah Crane, with whom he had four clandestine children. He did not marry Sarah until both his parents were dead, and subsequently had a sole legitimate son, Richard (1840-1883).

The second of the four illegitimate children, William Roupell (1831-1909), assisted his father in developing fifty-five acres of land around Streatham Hill into the Roupell Park estate. He too was ambitious, and became MP for Lambeth in 1857 after spending £6,000 on campaigning. This was expedited by destroying his father’s will that left his estate to sixteen-year-old Richard, and forging a substitute that made his mother sole heir and himself sole executor.

This fraud unravelled in 1862, and though he destroyed documents and fled to Spain, he chose to return and face charges. He repented in a confessional pamphlet, and after serving a fourteen-year sentence he went to live with his mother and sister on Brixton Hill, made himself respectable but not frugal, outlived the rest of the family and died in poverty. Three hundred people attended when he was buried in the family vault in West Norwood Cemetery, the last of the Roupells.

Roupell Street is the sole memento of these doings, an urbane enclave that takes no notice of Waterloo East Station and the South Bank. The elegant little cottages are built in a warm brown brick, many of them with gables that are oddly out of step with the rhythm of the front doors.

In the middle of the grid of streets is a dignified pub, the King’s Arms, which looks as if it hasn’t changed for a century, but boasts a fine Thai kitchen. The Londonist website [King’s Arms | Londonist] advises, “[it] might lazily be declared a ‘hidden gem’. Judging by the crowds who find the place every evening, there’s nothing very ‘hidden’ about it. Turn up of an afternoon, however, and you’ll find the perfect corner pub for a quiet pint.” Its interior is described and evaluated at King’s Arms, London – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale.

If I didn’t know Eric, who knows London, I would never have found it.

Pride of Blackpool

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Basil Newby, the founder and proprietor of the Blackpool cabaret bar Funny Girls, has announced his intention to retire and has put the business on the market: Basil Newby: Blackpool’s pioneering drag bar owner to retire – BBC News.

He breathed new life into the resort’s declining tourist economy when he founded the Flamingo night club in 1979 before taking over the vast derelict Odeon Cinema and transforming it into Funny Girls in 2002: Funny Girls | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

He had difficulty gaining a licence for the Flamingo because he refused to conceal his sexuality [When Basil Newby opened Blackpool’s first gay club, his solicitor had one question – LancsLive], yet when he opened Funny Girls the guest of honour was Joan Collins.

Funny Girls was and is inclusive, offering high-quality dance-entertainment introduced by a sharp-tongued compère, alongside the option of a pre-performance dinner, to gay and straight patrons.

Staid Lancashire businessmen at one time found it hard to believe that the glamorous girls on stage and the waitresses who served dinner were in fact men.

Straight Sheffield footballers of my acquaintance, and their girlfriends, made repeat visits because they thought the show was “a reyt laff”.

It’s a measure both of Basil’s achievement and the transformation of British culture since the 1990s that he has collected tributes ranging from a private box at the Grand Theatre to an MBE for services to business and to the LGBTQIA+ community.

And it’s heartening to see that he’s appointed the auctioneers Christie & Co specifically to find a suitable buyer to continue the venue’s proud tradition intact: Funny Girls drag cabaret bar in Blackpool for sale | Christie & Co.

Long may the old Odeon continue to offer holidaymakers what Dr Samuel Johnson called “the publick stock of harmless pleasure [and] the gaiety of nations”: Our Story | Funny Girls.

Hepworth’s Arcade

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Hepworth’s Arcade is a picturesque shopping opportunity in Hull’s Old Town, situated on the corner of Silver Street (the continuation of Whitefriargate) and Market Place.

It was built in 1894 for the Leeds tailor Joseph Hepworth (1834-1911), who had founded his clothing factory with his brother-in-law James Rhodes in Leeds in 1864. The company moved into retailing in the 1880s and the Hull arcade was part of Joseph Hepworth’s development of a chain of tailor’s shops across Great Britain.

In the years after Joseph Hepworth’s death the company became the largest clothing manufacturer in Britain. (Though greatly transformed, the company still exists; it’s now known as Next plc.)

The arcade was designed by Alfred Gelder & Llewellyn Kitchen, a practice that survived until 2021 with headquarters at Maister House, a few minutes’ walk away on Hull’s High Street.

Hepworth’s Arcade is L-shaped, lit by barrel-vaulted glazing linked by an octagonal glass dome and cupola. Most of the units were originally two-storey, except that those at the Silver Street (north) and Market Place (east) entrances have three storeys.

The street facades are described as “Renaissance” in style, with segmental-arched entrances and bay windows with swan’s-neck pediments.

Hepworth’s original “new and handsome” premises were at No 8 Silver Street, a spacious unit at the entrance to the arcade. It set the tone for affluent customers seeking fashionable apparel.

Marks & Spencer provided a further magnet for customers when they opened one of their “Penny Bazaars” at 15, 17 and 19 Hepworth’s Arcade in 1899, transforming their units into an open-plan market which could be closed by roller shutters at the end of the trading day.

The departure of Marks & Spencer to prestigious premises (now abandoned) in Whitefriargate in 1931 signalled the beginning of a decline in shopping in the Old Town.

Nevertheless, in the repeated German attacks on Hull in 1941, the Arcade was blasted but not directly bombed, and its premises were in heavy demand while the city centre was redeveloped after the war.

Eventually, as the brand-new buildings between Queen Victoria Square and Paragon Station refocused the shopping area, the Arcade was taken over by Hull City Council in 1961.

It was listed Grade II in 1990 and refurbished in 1995 and again in 2002.

There’s a prodigious collection of photographs, from 360° panoramas to fine details, at Hepworth’s Arcade, Non Civil Parish – 1283101 | Historic England.

And all the history of shops and tenants that’s fit to print is set out in enormous detail in Graham Hardy, Hepworth’s Arcade: one hundred years of trading (Hutton Press 1996).

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