Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Boot’s Folly

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Boot's Folly, near Strines, Sheffield

Boot’s Folly, near Strines, Sheffield

I dislike the term “folly”, referring to extravagant and apparently useless buildings and structures.

Quite often, the constructors of eccentric buildings had a purpose, and knew exactly what they were doing.

The Wentworth Marquises of Rockingham and Earls Fitzwilliam constructed what are now called the Wentworth Monuments to embellish the landscape and to commemorate important events.

Eye-catchers such as Deer Park Lodge at Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire, and Sir Thomas Tresham’s famous Triangular Lodge at Rushton, Northamptonshire though decorative, doubled as functional estate buildings.

Boot’s Folly, a plain square tower, 45 feet high, that can be seen across the hills north-west of Sheffield between Bradfield and Strines, is unambiguously a folly.

It stands over a thousand feet above sea-level, and is built of the stones of three demolished farms.

Its builder was the canny construction magnate Charles Boot (1874-1945) who lived at Sugworth Hall in the valley below.

He was the son of Henry Boot (1851-1931), who founded the family company and built it from nothing. Charles took over from his father just before the First World War, made a fortune from military contracts during the war and then continued to grow his wealth through post-war construction, particularly housing in Britain and on the continent. He was also the founder of the Pinewood film studios.

In the spirit of all the best follies, there’s no clear reason why he built his tower. A customary explanation is the desire to provide employment for the unemployed, like Joseph Williamson at Edge Hill or the 5th Duke of Portland at Welbeck. A more distinctive story is that Charles Boot wanted a vantage point within sight of Bradfield churchyard where his wife was buried in 1926, the year before the tower was built.

Originally, a staircase led to a panelled room at the top of the tower, but this was dismantled – so the story goes – after a cow strayed up the stairs and had to be rescued with difficulty.

There is a fine set of images of the tower at http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=30431#.VUOvKOl0zcs.

Lafite, 2014

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Joanna Vasconcelos, 'Lafite, 2015' (one of a pair), Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire

Joanna Vasconcelos, ‘Lafite, 2015’ (one of a pair), Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire

I’m habitually suspicious of modern art, sensing that some of it is a repository for rich people’s spare capital and much of it is artists’ scratching their imaginative itches in preference to providing pleasure for non-artists.

On the contrary, I took an immediate liking to a pair of sculptures that I found installed at the entrance to Waddesdon Manor, the great French-style chateau that Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild built on a bare hilltop in Buckinghamshire between 1874 and 1889. Though Waddesdon was given to the National Trust in 1957, it is run by a Rothschild family trust, and the nearby subsidiary house at Eythrop is the residence of Jacob, Lord Rothschild.

Joanna Vasconcelos’ Lafite, 2015 celebrates the family’s connection with wine and their great Bordeaux estate, Château Lafite Rothschild. It consists of a pair of giant candlesticks composed of over a thousand magnums, neatly connecting the magnificent Rothschild fine art within the house with the produce of the family vineyards: http://www.joanavasconcelos.com/info_en.aspx?oid=3570.

At night the candlesticks light up.

Joanna Vasconcelos’ trademark is to construct artworks from everyday forms, such as Piano Dentelle, 2008-2011 [http://www.joanavasconcelos.com/info_en.aspx?oid=755], Pavillon de Thé, 2012 [http://www.joanavasconcelos.com/info_en.aspx?oid=2085] and Call Centre, 2014 [http://www.joanavasconcelos.com/info_en.aspx?oid=2864]. For more illustrations of Joanna Vasconcelos’ work, see http://www.joanavasconcelos.com/obras_en.aspx.

Waddesdon Manor is one of the National Trust’s most popular sites, and is best visited at off-peak times: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/waddesdon-manor.

You can treat yourself to a bottle of wine if you’ve a bob or two to spare: http://www.waddesdon.org.uk/shop-and-eat/wine-shop.

Abbeydale Picture House Film Revival

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Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield: Film Revival, Sunday July 18th 2015

Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield: Film Revival, Sunday July 18th-19th 2015

Photos:  Scott Hukins [SCOTT HUKINS : PHOTOGRAPHER (wordpress.com)]

For the first time in forty years, a sizeable audience sat in the stalls of the Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield’s finest surviving suburban cinema, and watched feature films on the big screen over the weekend of July 18th-19th 2015:  Picture House Revival – Exposed Magazine

Thanks to the inspired vision of the arts platform Hand Of, run by three recent Sheffield graduates, Rob Hughes, Louise Snape and Ismar Badzic, several hundred people – some of them from surprisingly far afield – experienced this very special building doing what it was designed to do, making people happy.

Pullman-style seats – more comfortable than the originals – were installed, together with three bars, one of which sold sarsaparilla, the traditional temperance drink of pre-1960s Sheffield. Outside in the car-park there was a rich choice of street food and cakes; in the foyer, the distinctive fragrance of popcorn hung in the air.

The choice of films touched on Yorkshire’s film heritage – Brassed Off (1996) and Four Lions (2010) – and the Abbeydale’s heyday – two Laurel & Hardy titles, the short Brats (1930) and the feature A Chump at Oxford (1940), together with the first feature-film ever shown at the Abbeydale on its opening night, December 20th 1920, The Call of the Road, starring the British boxer-turned-actor Victor McLaglen.

The Call of the Road was a very special opportunity to see a silent movie as it was originally presented, on a big screen, with a fully improvised piano accompaniment by the virtuoso Jonathan Best.  Any other experience of pre-1929 feature films pales in comparison with watching a clear print, run at the correct speed, with live musical accompaniment in a crowded auditorium.

The afternoon was made even more special by the presence in the audience of Vincente Stienlet, grandson of Pascal J Stienlet who designed the building, and Cynthia Allen McLaglen, the niece of the film-star Victor McLaglen.

The Abbeydale has been very lucky in its owners since 1975 – the office-equipment dealers A & F Drake Ltd who found a use for the place into the early 1990s, the Friends of the Abbeydale Picture House who made use of it up to 2012, and the current owner Phil Robins who is developing it as a multipurpose community venue.

The Picture House Revival was a huge step forward in bringing the place back to life. Thanks to Rob, Louise and Ismar, the place was lit up on Saturday and Sunday evening, and after the end of the show crowds of people poured out on to the street, smiling.

Movies return to the Abbeydale

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Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

I’ve been providing historical back-up to an events organisation, Hand Of, who are devising an film weekend to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the last picture show at the Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield.

Picture House Revival: a Festival of Film takes place on Saturday July 18th and Sunday July 19th 2015, combining films, food, popcorn, ice cream, real ale and a sarsaparilla bar, a recreation of  a once much-loved temperance alternative to Sheffield’s pubs: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/picture-house-revival-a-festival-of-film-tickets-17122290231.

In fact, the event doesn’t take place on the actually anniversary (which would be July 5th) and it doesn’t reproduce the last picture show (Charles Bronson in Breakout, supported by Lords of Flatbush).

Instead, the programme includes the very first film ever shown at the Abbeydale, on December 20th 1920, a costume romance called The Call of the Road, billed as “a picture that will make history”, alongside Laurel & Hardy and more recent Yorkshire favourites, Brassed Off (Mark Harmon 1996) and Four Lions (Chris Morris 2010).

It’s a very exciting development to bring back movies to one of the few surviving Sheffield suburban cinemas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVD7_x3cb1w.

I hope it’ll be the first of many film revivals in the Abbeydale.

Stately pre-fab

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Hill Bark, Frankby, Cheshire

Hill Bark, Frankby, Cheshire

Robert Spear Hudson (1812-1884) was the man who first popularised soap powder, working from his modest shop in West Bromwich. He eventually moved his business to a factory in Bank Hall, Liverpool, and went to live in Chester.

His son Robert William Hudson (1856-1937) became extremely wealthy and sold the business to Lever Brothers in 1908.

He commissioned the distinguished local architect Edward Ould to build a Black-and-White Revival house in 1891 on a site near Bidston Hill on the Wirral.  It bears more than a passing resemblance to Little Moreton Hall, near Macclesfield – but built in reverse. It was named Bidston Grange.

Typically of its time and its style, Bidston Grange contained sumptuous glass by William Morris, and architectural bric-a-brac with antique associations – dining-room doors from a tea-clipper and a fireplace dated 1577 reputedly from “Sir Walter Raleigh’s former home”.

It was apparently the model, or at least the inspiration, for Cecelianhof, the Potsdam residence of the Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, built c1911 and subsequently the site of the signing of the Potsdam Agreement of 1945.

In 1921 Bidston Court was sold to Sir Ernest Royden (1873-1960), one of a dynasty of shipbuilders and shipowners.

Because Lady Royden disliked the way its setting was encroached by housing [http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/218605] the 1891 structure was dismantled and re-erected a property she had inherited five miles away at Frankby.

There it replaced a house of 1868-70, originally built for Septimus Ledward JP, which took its name ‘Hillbark’ from a stone barn that had stood for several centuries.

The Roydens’ transplanted residence became known as Hill Bark.

The original site at Vyner Road South, Bidston, is now a public garden.

When Sir Ernest Royden died in 1960, Hill Bark was purchased by Hoylake Urban District Council and converted into a residential home for the elderly.

It was sold in 1999 for £300,000 and converted first into a catering-facility specialising in weddings, opened in 2000, but using only the ground-floor rooms. In 2002 it was restored as a luxurious 19-bedroom five-star boutique hotel: http://www.hillbarkhotel.co.uk.

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

Leasowe Castle

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Leasowe Castle, Cheshire

Leasowe Castle, Cheshire

One of the most distinctive places to stay on the Wirral is Leasowe Castle, which was in fact never a castle, though it has been put to many uses in its four-hundred-year history.

Leasowe Castle is identified with the “New Hall” built by Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby in 1593, the year of his accession to his title, possibly as a stand from which to watch horse-racing on the flat shore.

A datestone bearing the Stanleys’ triskelion, the three-legged symbol of the Manx kingdom, is now in the Williamson Museum & Art Gallery in Birkenhead.

Ferdinando, Earl of Derby’s original structure was an octagonal tower with walls three feet thick, to which were later added four square towers, possibly by William, 6th Earl, in the early seventeenth century.

By the late seventeenth century the building was derelict and known locally as “Mockbeggar Hall” and for much of the eighteenth century it was used as a farmhouse.

In 1802 was sold to Margaret Boole, “the kind old lady of Leasowe Castle”, which she had made a refuge for the victims of shipwrecks and wreckers on the Wirral coast.

She set up Dannet’s Rocket Apparatus on the shore in an attempt to prevent shipwrecks and the pernicious activities of the local wreckers, who would show false lights in an attempt to lure vessels ashore.

Margaret Boole died in 1826 as a result of a carriage accident, and the Castle passed to her daughter and heir, Mary Anne, the wife of Col Edward Cust.

Colonel Cust converted the Castle to a hotel with the intention of establishing a resort in the grounds, and when this ambitious project failed in 1843 he turned back it into a residence which he kept until his death.

Edward Cust added most of the features of the building as it now stands –

  • the perimeter wall and entrance gateway
  • the Battle Staircase, its 84 wrought-iron balusters each carrying a painted nameplate commemorating a British victory
  • the dining room panelled with wood ostensibly taken in 1839 from the original Star Chamber in the Exchequer Buildings of the Palace of Westminster
  • the supposedly haunted library fitted with oak timbers from the submerged forest at Moels

– and possibly the oak Canute’s Chair, now lost, which stood above the high-water line, carved with the motto “Sea come not hither nor wet the sole of my foot”.

One of Col Edward Cust’s successors sold the Castle in 1891 to the Leasowe Castle Hotel company.

The original Star Chamber panels are reported to have been sold in the contents sale which took place on September 16th-20th 1895: the existing ones may be reproductions.

In 1910 the Castle was bought by the Trustees of the Railway Convalescent Home and, apart from an interlude during the First World War when it housed German prisoners of war, it remained in their hands until 1970.

In 1982 it returned to hotel use: http://www.leasowecastle.com.

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

Museum Mile – the Guggenheim Museum

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Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Solomon R Guggenheim (1861-1949) was a younger son of the mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim (1828-1905) and the founder of the Yukon Gold Company. He collected modern art and displayed his paintings at his apartment at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, until the collection became so large that it grew into the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which opened in 1939.

In 1943 he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s only New York building, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum [http://www.guggenheim.org], which eventually opened in 1959 – after the deaths of both the founder and the architect – at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street in the midst of the city’s Museum Mile.

There it sits, looking as if it’s landed from outer space, a deliberate challenge to the rectilinear patterns of the streets and the buildings around it.

Frank Lloyd Wright would rather have built it elsewhere – not in New York City, which he disliked – and chose the Fifth Avenue site because of its proximity to Central Park.

The spiral shape reflects a nautilus shell, and the divisions of the display areas echo the membranes of citrus fruit.

Like most Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, it looks remarkable yet has turned out to be remarkably difficult to maintain, and it’s undergone a series of repairs and renovations.

Though its aesthetic appeal is a matter of taste, there is no denying the impact of this sensuous, swirling structure.

Its practicality can best be appreciated by taking the ovoid lift to the top and following the gently graded spiral ramp, which inevitably dictates the order of viewing exhibits, round and round the central space.

The peculiarities of its display-space have irritated some artists and, indeed, some curators. It’s impossible to hang a flat painting on a concave wall, and difficult to place a rectilinear canvas on a sloping floor.

Others regard it as an exceptional context for showing artworks. Indeed, one of its most memorable exhibitions, Frank Gehry’s The Art of the Motorcycle (1998), was built around an assemblage of 114 historic motor-bikes.

The Guggenheim’s eccentricities do not suit all types of art by any means, but the building is a consummate work of art in its own right.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

Museum Mile – the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

You could quite easily spend an entire rainy week in New York working your way round the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This vast treasure house consists of almost 250 rooms filling something like twenty-one acres of floor-space, roughly two million square feet, and only about a quarter of the permanent collection can be exhibited at one time.

The core of the museum was built by the co-designer of Central Park, Calvert Vaux, in collaboration with Jacob Wrey Mould in 1880 to house a collection that had already outgrown two previous buildings on other sites in ten years: long since buried amid later accretions, the original museum has since been extended on at least eight occasions.

Among the most memorable experiences the Museum can offer are the 1978 Sackler Wing which houses the entire Egyptian Temple of Dendur and the Astor Court which contains a reproduction of a Ming dynasty Chinese garden.

A hint of the wealth of paintings in the Museum’s collection can be found simply by checking the Wikipedia entry’s ‘Selections from the permanent collection of paintings’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art.

Whenever you become footsore or simply overstimulated by this great world museum, the consummate life-enhancing experience is the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, where the memorable views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan compete with the exhibits.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

Museum Mile – the Frick Collection

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Frick Collection, New York City

Frick Collection, New York City

There’s a stretch of New York’s Fifth Avenue, bordering Central Park, that’s known as Museum Mile. It’s actually slightly longer than a mile and boasts, in its official definition between 82nd to 105th Streets, nine major city museums, with another couple further along.

My personal favourite is actually just outside Museum Mile, at 70th Street.

When I first visited New York City courtesy of Freddy Laker’s Skytrain in 1981, I knew only two people who’d ever been there. One was my friend Bill, who had lugged his motorbike aboard a tramp steamer and ridden across the USA both ways, and he made me promise that while I was in the Big Apple I’d go and sit by the fountain in the Frick Collection.

This I duly did, and every time I’ve returned to the city I make a point, if possible, of sending Bill a postcard from the Frick.

Built in Louis XVI style by Carrer & Hastings (1912-14), this was the town-house of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the unlikeable and notably unpopular chairman of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. After the death of Frick’s widow in 1931 the building was adapted as a museum which opened in 1935.

Of all the city’s many museums and galleries, the Frick is intimate and reassuringly calm. The Fountain Court created by John Russell Pope in the 1930s refurbishment must be among the most congenial places to sit and relax in the whole of New York City.

The core collection reflects Henry Clay Frick’s personal taste. I remember standing in front of a fireplace, looking at the Holbein of Sir Thomas More on one side and the same painter’s portrait of More’s nemesis, Thomas Cromwell, on the other.

There’s nowhere in the world quite like the Frick.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

158 Squadron Bomber Command

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185 Squadron Memorial, Lissett, East Yorkshire

185 Squadron Memorial, Lissett, East Yorkshire

I was privileged to be a guest when the Derwent Decorative & Fine Arts Society listened to a presentation about the 158 Squadron RAF Memorial on the site of RAF Lissett, by the artist Peter Naylor.

The story of 158 Squadron encapsulates the sacrifice of the men of Bomber Command in the Second World War. 851 personnel of the squadron were killed while based at RAF Lissett. Across Bomber Command as a whole, nearly 65% of those who flew didn’t come back. Their average age was 22. They were all volunteers.

Located on the East Yorkshire coast south of Bridlington, Lissett was the closest Yorkshire RAF base to Germany. It operated from February 1943 and was abandoned at the end of the War when 158 Squadron became part of Transport Command.

When Novera Energy PLC took over the site for a wind-farm in 2007, they agreed to finance a memorial to 158 Squadron, and the design competition was won by the Beverley artist Peter Wallwork Naylor: http://www.peternaylor.co.uk/public/158_Squadron_Memorial.html.

His vision is a silhouette in 15mm weathering steel of a seven-man bomber crew, based on a photograph. The figures are eight feet high, and the composition is curved so that on the seaward, convex side, the men are marching out to fight, and on the landward, concave side, they are returning home – as so many of them were unable to do.

On the steel are engraved the names of the 851 personnel who lost their lives, placed randomly rather than in alphabetical order, with the added phrase “And for all who served with 158 Squadron”.

It’s a particularly powerful image to come across, driving down a quiet lane in the depths of East Yorkshire: http://www.158squadron.co.uk/158_Squadron_pages/158_Memorial.html.

There’s a lay-by with informative interpretation boards.

In the fields behind the memorial are Novera Energy’s twelve huge wind-turbines, made in Germany.