Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Shrine of books and manuscripts

John Rylands Library, Manchester

Leave the traffic and bustle of Manchester’s Deansgate, and step into the studious quiet of the John Rylands Library, and you’re transported to a different world – of peace, calm and more books and manuscripts to study and admire than you could absorb in a lifetime.

It’s no longer usual to enter through the street doors into the gloom of the original entrance lobby, which in some ways is a pity. Instead you enter through a light, white modern wing that brings you to the original Gothic library by a gradual route.

This brown stone Gothic Revival temple of learning is a monument to one of Manchester’s greatest cotton merchants and philanthropists, John Rylands (1801-1888), conceived and paid for by his third wife and widow, the Cuban-born Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (1843-1908).

She had a very strong idea of what she wanted – a free public scholarly library in the heart of the city of Manchester, for which she purchased as core collections the Althorp Library of Lord Spencer and, later, the Bibliotheca Lindesiana from the Earl of Crawford.

Initially, she intended the library to specialise in theology, and specified a Gothic building that would suggest ecclesiastical and university architecture, so she engaged Basil Champneys (1842-1935) on the strength of his work at Mansfield College, Oxford (1887-90) [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_College,_Oxford].

Enriqueta Rylands was so anxious to begin work on the Deansgate site that, though Champneys produced the initial design within a week of gaining the commission, she demanded to see building work begin before the detailed work had even started.

To satisfy her, he contrived a 4ft 6in concrete platform on which later rose his spatially complex, technological advanced repository of some of the most valuable books in Manchester – its interior insulated from the smoke and noise of the city by lobbies and ventilated by the best air-conditioning that was practical at the time.

The reading-room is on the first floor, to catch the limited available light, approached by a capacious, picturesque sequence of staircases, galleries and vaults that Nikolaus Pevsner described as “a cavalier throwing-away of whole large parts of the building to spatial extravagance pure and simple”.

The atmosphere of monastic calm, within yards of the busy city-centre street, is dramatic, and reflects the religious emphasis of the original book-collection, though Mrs Rylands insisted on toning down some ecclesiastical features such as the intended traceried screens to the reading-bays.

Despite the romanticism of its aesthetic appeal the building was designed to be fireproof, with a six-inch ferro-concrete lining to the masonry vaults, and was from the beginning lit by electricity, generated in the huge basement.

Cost was not a restriction: when it opened in 1900 the bill came to £230,000, and by 1913 Champneys was required to extend the building. Further extensions were added in the 1960s and in 2004-7.

Since 1972 the building has been the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, though members of the public are free to join: John Rylands Research Institute and Library (The University of Manchester Library).

The building itself is open to the public [Visit (The University of Manchester Library)], and the entrance wing contains the excellent Café Rylands and a quality bookshop.

It’s worth seeking out.

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

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

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. 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.

Savoy tales

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Savoy Hotel, London

My 1960s grammar-school education was enlivened by the headmaster’s obsession with the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan, which provided our only experience of practical drama. Shakespeare was for classroom study; any play written after 1900 was to be seen in the professional theatre.

I didn’t understand for years why the G&S canon is referred to as the “Savoy operas”.

The reason, of course, is that the promoter of these odd survivals of Victorian show-business was Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844-1901), who used the capital he accumulated from the first collaborations of William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) to build a brand-new theatre on the land between the Strand and the Thames Embankment, ground which had been the site of the medieval Savoy Palace, of which the chapel still survives.

He named his new venue the Savoy Theatre. When it opened in 1881 it was the first building in the world to be entirely lit by electricity, though limited generating capacity meant that the stage itself was lit by gas for the first couple of months.

D’Oyly Carte’s other theatrical innovations included free programmes, queues, numbered tickets and tea at the interval.

The Savoy Theatre was built on the profits of Trial by Jury, HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and Patience, which transferred from the Opera Comique to open the Savoy Theatre. Gilbert & Sullivan’s first work for the new theatre was Iolanthe.

It seems that the profits of The Mikado provided the capital for D’Oyly Carte to build the Savoy Hotel (1889), which boasted no less than 67 bathrooms, “ascending rooms” between each floor and “speaking tubes” communicating between floors.

When the hotel was enlarged in 1903 its main entrance transferred to the Strand, and the theatre-foyer was moved to the hotel courtyard, so that the audience enters at a level higher than the top of the proscenium arch, descending to their seats by stairs and corridors which are partly beneath the roadway of Savoy Court, the only roadway in Britain where vehicles drive on the right.

Rupert D’Oyly Carte, Richard’s son, had the entire theatre remodelled in 1929 in an uncompromisingly modern manner by Frank A Tugwell and Basil Ionides – a splendid confection of silver and gold, autumnal fabrics and concealed lighting.

This was the venue for the 1941 première of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

During a renovation in 1990 a fire destroyed the entire auditorium. The terms of the theatre’s insurance required that Tugwell and Ionides’ design should be meticulously reinstated, and so it reopened in 1993. The architect, Sir William Whitfield, added a further storey, so that now the 56-ft stage-tower is surmounted by plant rooms and a leisure-centre with a swimming pool.

The hotel was closed in 2007 for a comprehensive renovation that took until 2010.

The stories and the personalities attached to the theatre and the hotel are endless. My own favourite is of the actor, Richard Harris (1930-2002), a long-time resident, who was carried out of the hotel foyer on a stretcher on his way to his hospital death-bed, shouting to passers-by, “It was the food!”

There is a comprehensive history of the theatre in Kevin Chapple et al, Reflected Light: the story of the Savoy Theatre (Dewynters 1993).

To see what’s on at the Savoy Theatre, go to http://www.savoytheatre.org. The Savoy Hotel website is http://www.fairmont.com/savoy.

High society

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Tuscan Temple, Duncombe Terrace, North Yorkshire

You can spend an enjoyable day in North Yorkshire pretending to be an eighteenth-century aristocrat lording it over the landscape.

Visit (in either order) Duncombe Park [http://www.duncombepark.com/the_garden.shtml] and Rievaulx Terrace [http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/rievaulx-terrace].

In the grounds of Duncombe Park, stretching along Ryedale towards Rievaulx Abbey, are a series of artificial high-level terraces.

Duncombe Terrace is significant because it’s one of the first such features to ignore formal geometry and follow the contour.

It’s punctuated by two temples dating from around 1730, an Ionic rotunda which closely resembles Vanburgh’s Rotondo at Stowe (1721), and a circular Tuscan temple.

The terraces at Rievaulx are rather later, dating from about 1758. The pattern is the same, with a temple at either end, and the Rievaulx temples follow the same classical orders as their companions at Duncombe, but in this case a circular Doric Temple is paired with a rectangular Ionic Temple.

Both are spectacularly expensive ways of giving guests somewhere to stroll, and apart from the landmark temples, each provides dramatic vistas: the Duncombe terrace looks across to Helmsley Castle, while the walk at Rievaulx provides a whole series of views, cut through the trees, to the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in the valley below.

The two sets of terraces are some three miles apart, and it’s probable that they were meant to connect by means of a scenic ride. Large worked stones found in the intervening river-bed could have been the basis for a viaduct.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s comment [The Buildings of England: Yorkshire: The North Riding (Penguin 1966)] on Rievaulx Terrace sums up the breathtaking assurance of the eighteenth-century handling of natural and man-made beauty:

The whole composition…is a superlative example of large-scale landscape gardening and of that unquestioning sense of being on top of the world which the rich and the noble in England possessed throughout the Georgian period.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Country Houses of North-East Yorkshire tour, with text, photographs, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing. To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Fab Four

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: Fab Four event, April 13th 2012 – from left to right, 4464 Bittern, 4468 Mallard, 60103 Flying Scotsman, 4771 Green Arrow

My friend Doug, who likes trains nearly as much as he likes buses, tipped me off that the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event would be good value.

The original intention behind the title, apparently, was to reunite for the first time in preservation examples of the LNER A1, A2, A3 and A4 locomotive classes.

I had to look this up, having discarded my Ian Allan spotting books many years ago.

The A1 Pacific locomotives were all scrapped in the early 1960s, and a brand-new version, 60163 Tornado, has been painstakingly constructed.

The A2 was an updated version of the A1. Its sole survivor is a household name, 60532 Blue Peter, which looks magnificent and only needs half a million pounds spending on its next overhaul.

The only surviving A3 is an even more familiar household name, 60103 Flying Scotsman, saved by the late Alan Pegler, doyen of railway enthusiasts. (His obituary in The Times, March 23rd 2012, relates a life well lived: “When the good Lord calls me to the happy shunting yard in the sky, I shall have no regrets,” he told the Railway Magazine. “I’ve had a great innings.”)

The Fab Four plan came adrift because Flying Scotsman, nearing the end of its latest overhaul, was indisposed, so the Barrow Hill people and their sponsors, Railway Magazine, fielded two examples of the instantly familiar streamlined A4 class, LNER 4464 Bittern, which is in full working order, and the record-breaking 4468 Mallard, which is apparently regarded as so precious a piece of history that it hasn’t steamed since the 1980s.

It was a tremendous show, and drew hordes of visitors, including hard-core railway photographers who carry not only dauntingly huge cameras but also stepladders, like paparazzi.

The implicit thematic intention was to show locomotives that hauled the East Coast main line expresses between London and Edinburgh and beyond.

In addition to the Fab Four, there were other locomotives with an East Coast Route connection.

Great Northern 251, dating from 1902, spun on its own axis on the roundhouse turntable. LNER 4771 Green Arrow, a variant version of Sir Nigel Gresley’s Pacifics, lined up with the Fab Four. 61994 The Great Marquess, a more rugged beast designed for yomping across the Scottish Highlands, pulled trains up and down the Barrow Hill demonstration track.

Barrow Hill is also the home base of the Deltic Preservation Society, which maintains in running order a roster of three of the diesel successors to the steam-powered Fab Four.

It was a fine display, beautifully organised. I warmed to the fact that every Barrow Hill volunteer I spoke to wished me an enjoyable day. They may have been scripted but they clearly meant it. I admired the fact that the carriages hauled by The Great Marquess were immaculately turned out in British Railways maroon on the side that the public sees; the other side is still in the Rail Blue livery that they brought from mainline service.

I had only one complaint about the whole experience. The advertised advance-ticket prices were fictional. It was practically impossible to buy a ticket in advance without paying a “transaction fee” of £1.00.

I don’t at all mind paying £15.00 rather than £14.00 for an entertainment. But I do expect to pay the price on the price-tag. Compulsory add-ons simply make me feel ripped off.

There’s no need for it. It would have cost the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and the Ticket Factory nothing at all to come clean and say the cost is £1 more than they pretended.

To do otherwise leaves a nasty taste.

Round house on the Old Road

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire

To this day, when trains north from Chesterfield turn right towards Barrow Hill and Beighton, rather than take the direct route via Dronfield into Sheffield, railway staff call it the “Old Road”, because it’s the line of the North Midland Railway which opened in 1840. The newer route was opened thirty years later, so has now been new for nearly 150 years.

At the same time that the Midland Railway opened its direct route north into Sheffield, the Barrow Hill locomotive shed was constructed. It has survived to become a unique piece of railway archaeology – the only surviving operational roundhouse locomotive depot in the UK.

There are other British roundhouses, of course: the Roundhouse at Camden Town, in north London is now a celebrated arts venue [Visiting the Roundhouse | Roundhouse], the Derby Roundhouse is a multipurpose conference venue [Derby Roundhouse | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] and the main hall of the National Railway Museum is built around one of the two turntables of the former York North motive-power depot in Britain.

But only at Barrow Hill can you sense, smell, almost taste the atmosphere of coal and oil and grime that characterised the age of the steam locomotive.

And there, within the roundhouse itself and in the surrounding buildings, the graft of maintaining steam and diesel locomotives continues, thanks to the vision of a group of enthusiasts who realised that when the place closed to operational use by British Rail in 1991 an important piece of railway heritage was in danger.

The Barrow Hill roundhouse is home to a variety of preservation projects, including the Deltic Preservation Society and the Brighton Belle project [http://www.brightonbelle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=200113].

This is a workaday place. Visitors are welcome, but there’s a healthy preoccupation with getting jobs done. Contemplate the hours of graft that bring back the neglected railway heritage; ask questions and show an interest. It’s places like Barrow Hill that keep the antique wheels on the modern rails.

Didcot Railway Centre has something of the same atmosphere, but is more fully developed as a tourist site.

For details of opening-times and special events at Barrow Hill, see Barrow Hill Roundhouse Museum – Britain’s last surviving working Roundhouse.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list features the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. 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.

Rail museum proceeds with caution

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National Railway Museum, York: Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway signalman training model

It’s an interesting reflection on British culture that, in addition to a National Gallery and a National Portrait Gallery, we have a National Collection of railway vehicles – 280 locomotives and items of rolling stock, most of them distributed between the Science Museum in London, the Locomotion museum at Shildon, Co Durham, and the National Railway Museum in York [http://www.nrm.org.uk/OurCollection/LocomotivesAndRollingStock.aspx?pageNo=1&cat=All&comp=All&ipp=96].

The York museum has something for everyone. I once took a school group there, and discovered the kids enthusiastically tracking the lavatory outlets on the Royal Train carriages.

NRM York, as it’s now called, started in a small way, built around the core collection of historic artefacts that came from the Stockton & Darlington Railway and its successors, the North Eastern and London & North Eastern Railways. Gradually, the other three of the pre-war “Big Four” railways added items which ultimately found a home on the site of the York North locomotive depot, literally across the line from the city’s passenger station.

This location has been repeatedly transformed, in 1975 when the Museum opened celebrating the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, in 1990-2 when the main building was re-roofed to create the Great Hall and in 1999 when the site was extended to create The Works.

There is so much potential in this vast collection of transport memorabilia. I’d particularly like to see the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway’s signalman training model displayed with sufficient space to appreciate fully its scale and complexity.

And the miracle of the NRM and the other great national museums and galleries is that they continue to offer free admission.

For that we should be grateful – and as generous as possible in support.

Corinthian café

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Assembly Rooms, York

The most magnificent eighteenth-century interior in York is the Assembly Rooms (1731-2), designed for grand public gatherings by the grandest architect of the day, Lord Burlington (1694-1753), who for a generation locked British building design into the classical Roman style promoted by the sixteenth-century Italian architect, Andrea Palladio.

Burlington’s Yorkshire residence (now demolished) was at Londesborough, from where he would naturally visit York for the assizes and the races. His neighbours were clearly grateful to him for providing a decorous environment for social occasions: “We entirely leave to your lordship to do in what manner you shall think proper.”

His lordship conceived the Great Assembly Room, as it was called, as a Vitruvian Egyptian Hall – in other words, Egyptian as understood by the Roman writer Vitruvius, interpreted by the Italian designer Palladio.

It is a truly magnificent space, 112 feet by 40 feet and 40 feet high, bordered by huge Corinthian columns, eighteen on the long sides and six across the ends, painted, marbled and gilded. In daylight this toplit space is breathtaking; at night, when sympathetically lit, it is magical.

Now it’s a restaurant, operated by the ASK Italian chain [http://www.askitalian.co.uk/#!/restaurants/york].

I’ve taken every opportunity to eat there because there’s no more elegant accessible eating place in the city, and I’ve regularly brought people there to be impressed.

Originally, there were tablecloths, and elegantly dressed staff, and baroque music on the PA system.

The last time I went the tables were bare and the chairs hard and modern. All the waiters, male and female, were in denims and T-shirts. The music was wallpaper.

The cheerful and welcoming staff were energetically hospitable. They asked how we were so often they might have been working for the NHS. When they were wrong-footed into a unscripted conversation they turned out to be warm and charming.

The maitre d’ tells me that all this is a marketing concept. It’s called Milano. Presumably it saves laundry bills while increasing footfall. But it demeans the building.

The food is as excellent as ever. For £13.95 my mate Richard and I had bruschetta classica (Italian bread with chopped marinated tomatoes), rigatoni di manzo piccante (pasta and meatballs) and apple rustica (essentially apple crumble). This was the winter set menu, and will no doubt have changed with the season.

I’m imagine this admirable menu is on offer at every ASK Italian restaurant in the country. I gather that wherever you eat it you sit on the same tables and chairs.

The furniture sits well in an ordinary building, like my local ASK Italian in Sheffield. But there’s nothing anywhere like the York Assembly Rooms. The building deserves appropriate dressing.

ASK Italian’s mission-statement says, “We want it to be amazing. A restaurant that’s fresh and bold. With a passion for the details.” To which I say, in York at least, bring back tablecloths (paper if necessary) and turn up the Vivaldi.

The 44-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic York tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing. To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Excuse for a sneck-lifter

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The Blue Bell, 53 Fossgate, York

When my mate Richard and I have a day out together there’s always a problem period around late afternoon, when we struggle to find something to do. The shops and tourist places start to close down, and it’s too early to dine in style.

In York recently we sandwiched the National Railway Museum between coffee, lunch and afternoon tea, and then spent an hour in the small but enriching York Art Gallery [http://www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/Page/Index.aspx].

Thanks to the Good Beer Guide [http://www.camra.org.uk/gbg] we came upon the Blue Bell, 53 Fossgate – easily missed, and unmissable.

It’s an utterly unremarkable-looking place until you step inside. It has a bar and a smoke-room, neither big enough to swing a cat in, board-panelled from floor to ceiling. There’s a real fire and a splendid choice of beers. The old cliché about stepping into someone’s front room is entirely apt at the Blue Bell.

It seems odd that the Blue Bell is listed II*, until you read the English Heritage list description: http://list.english-heritage.org.uk/resultsingle.aspx?uid=1257825.

Like many buildings in the streets of central York, the Blue Bell and no 54 next door have a timbered core, here dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century. The jettied timber fronts were cut back and refaced sometime in the late eighteenth century.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when no 53 became the Blue Bell, an embossed front window was installed. Since then, very little is changed: the list description, without specifying a date, describes it as “the last C19 pub interior in York to survive intact”.

This is probably because it was continuously owned by the same family for almost a century until 1993.

Like the more famous “Nellie’s”, the White Horse Inn in Beverley, East Yorkshire, the Blue Bell has survived all the vicissitudes of the licensed trade through the twentieth century, so that it’s now a tiny treasure, an unlikely jewel in the crown of the historic heart of York.

And it’s a particularly good place for what in Yorkshire we call a “sneck-lifter”. “Sneck” is the latch of a door or gate. When you lift the sneck, literally, it lets you into warmth and hospitality. When you sip your first pint (and your second), you’re ready to enjoy the next few hours.

Update: Evidence that a quiet night is virtually guaranteed in the Blue Bell is to be found in this article in the Daily Mail (March 22nd 2013): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297549/The-Blue-Bell-York-axed-national-beer-guide-discriminates-non-regulars.html.

New Blackpool trams

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Starr Gate Terminus, Blackpool (June 2012)

The new Blackpool trams began operating on April 4th 2012 – sleek, smooth articulated LRTs in a funky purple-and-white colour scheme.

It’s a superb service, all the way from Starr Gate to Fleetwood and back with space, comfort and ease. It cost £100 million.

The demise of the old fleet is regretted by some, but it really was past its sell-by date. Some trams dated back to the 1930s, and many had been rebuilt and patched like the hammer with three new handles and two new heads: [see Essentially Victorian Blackpool and Tram terminus].

The beauty of the promenade tramway, and the reason it survived, is its ability to shift holiday crowds, most of all at the illuminations. Blackpool trams have always been much bigger than buses, and they take up less road space because they mostly run on their own private tracks.

And the new ones, like the old ones, appear to be crewed by committees.

And if you want a nostalgia trip, you can pay buy a day-saver to use the heritage fleet, when it’s running: Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours – Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours.

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.

Exploring Melbourne: Madame Brussels

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Tomb of Sir Samuel Gillott (1838-1913), General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

Dave is one of the half-dozen brightest people I ever taught. When I told him that he asked for it in writing. QED.

I hadn’t seen him for ten years when we met up in Melbourne, where he’s worked for the past few years and is happily settled.

We acted out the Australian dream drinking beer in the sunshine at the Beachcomber at the St Kilda Sea Baths: http://www.beachcombercafe.com.au/www/home, and then we hopped on a tram to sample the fleshpots of central Melbourne.

I recall, with diminishing coherence, the Palmz roof bar at the Carlton on Bourke Street [http://www.thecarlton.com.au/functions/palmz-rooftop-bar-melbourne], Penny Blue (in the former Money Order Building next to the GPO) [http://www.pennyblue.com.au], before eating at the Golden Monkey [http://www.goldenmonkey.com.au] where Dave’s marital-arts experience came in useful tussling with the Japanese menu.

On a second evening out we drank at the Gin Palace [http://www.ginpalace.com.au] where the gents has a set of urinals for use and another for lighting, and ate at Sarti [http://www.sartirestaurant.com.au].

At some point I regaled Dave (who is at heart a Sheffield lad) with the story of Sir Samuel Gillott (1838-1913), a Sheffield lad who emigrated to Melbourne at the age of eighteen, trained as a lawyer and operated as a politician, became Melbourne’s first Lord Mayor and was eventually exposed for his financial dealings with a lady called Caroline Hodgson, who traded as Madame Brussels and ran brothels like banks, with branch operations scattered around the city-centre.

Without a word Dave led me into a strange rooftop bar with artificial grass instead of a carpet and waitresses in maids’ outfits with white ankle socks, where only after I’d ordered St George Ethiopian beer and turned to the menu did I discover the name of the place: http://www.madamebrussels.com.

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