Category Archives: Demolished Sheffield

Rue Britannia

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Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

The surviving mid-nineteenth century music halls in the UK can almost be counted on one hand – Wilton’s and the Hoxton Hall in London, the Old Malt Cross and the Talbot (latterly Yates’s Wine Lodge and now Slug & Lettuce) in Nottingham, the City Varieties in Leeds and the Britannia in Glasgow.  Sheffield had a couple of surviving examples until the 1990s, and one of them at least was worth saving.

In the second half of the nineteenth century West Bar, which runs along the valley floor below the hill on which the town centre had grown, was what the journalist Steve McClarence described as “the Shaftesbury Avenue of the Sheffield working man”.  Here stood the Surrey Music Hall, which burnt down spectacularly in 1865, the Bijou (which survived as a tacky cinema into the 1930s), the London Apprentice (demolished in the 1970s) and the Gaiety, of which fragments survived until it was demolished c2000 to clear space for the Inner Ring Road.

The Gaiety in its heyday was owned by Louis Metzger, a pork-butcher.  He kept a musical pig called Lucy who, if plied with beer, would sing – as indeed a pig owned by a pork-butcher might.

The Britannia Music Hall on West Bar stood literally next door to the former police- and fire-station that is now the National Emergency Services Museum.  Built on the back-land behind the older Tankard Tavern, it dated from around the mid-1850s, and was superseded by bigger, better and more central variety theatres in the 1890s.

Incredibly, it survived as a bathroom showroom, intact but altered with a floor built across the proscenium and a lift-shaft at the back of the auditorium, and was described in detail by historian Andrew Woodfield in 1978.  When I first encountered it in 1984 it was Pink Champagne, providing wedding goods and, it appeared, a venue for wedding receptions.

In February 1988, by which time it was operating as Harmony Wedding World, Ian McMillan and the late Martyn Wiley broadcast their BBC Radio Sheffield Saturday-morning show from the Britannia and an actor called Stuart Howson (whose great-grandfather had managed the Regent Theatre in the east end of Sheffield) gave the final performance, a couple of verses of a Victorian ballad, ‘The best of the bunch’.

Later the building became Door World and then, just as Sheffield City Council prepared to put a preservation order on it in 1992, it went up in flames and was quickly demolished.

There was much hand-wringing by the Council, the Hallamshire Historic Buildings Society, the Theatres Trust and the site-owners, West Bar Partnership who (in The Stage, April 4th 1992) “expressed regret”.  The fact remains that conservationists have to win every battle, while the developer only has to win one.

The space where the Britannia stood is now used for car sales.

The loss of the Britannia Music Hall is described and illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

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

Court adjourned

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Old Town Hall, Sheffield

Old Town Hall, Sheffield (2011)

George Eliot remarked, in Middlemarch (chapter 20), that “…the quickest of us walk about well wadded in stupidity”.  It’s astonishing how much we miss while going about our daily business.

When Valerie Bayliss led an intriguing Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group walk around just three streets in the centre of Sheffield earlier this summer, she ended at the Old Town Hall on the corner of Castle Street and Waingate.

This huge building, dating back to 1807-8, was repeatedly extended through the nineteenth century.  After the E W Mountford “new” Town Hall opened in 1897, it became law courts, with a tunnel connection to the Police Offices across the road in Castle Green.  The Old Town Hall, as it’s long been known, ceased to be used as law courts in 1997 and has been practically abandoned ever since.

I – and thousands of other Sheffielders – go past it daily without giving it a second glance.  It has no street presence.  Even the tower clock doesn’t work.

A 2001 plan to turn it into a nightclub and offices came to nothing, and it seems as if the owner has simply walked away from it.

Valerie and her group have kept an eye on it and campaigned to arrest its decay for years now:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/articles/2008/10/20/old_town_hall_feature.shtml].

Now is not a good time to pump money into a dying building.  Yet it’s barely credible that such a huge and important public building has no use, and has had no maintenance for fourteen years.

Future meetings of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group are advertised at South Yorkshire Group Events | Victorian Society.  Guests are welcome.  

Picture palace bites the dust

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Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe (1982)

Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe (1982)

Another building that the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group couldn’t visit during their Attercliffe walk in 2010 was the Pavilion Cinema, opened in 1915 and eventually demolished in 1982.

Though the original plans show that a classical interior was intended, in fact the auditorium was mock-Tudor, with black-and-white timbering, strapwork and lanterns as house-lights.  The auditorium was distinguished by side boxes, as in a theatre, very popular with couples:  the cinema management had an interesting strategy of pricing these box seats at 3/- for five people.

The Pavilion was converted to bingo briefly in 1970 and then became an Asian cinema:  at some point the owners repainted the entire auditorium in raspberry pink and two shades of blue.

When demolition began, in the innocent days before security fencing, I explored and photographed the entire building, primarily because it was one of the two Attercliffe cinemas that my parents patronised regularly on Saturday nights.  (My dad, who wasn’t nicknamed “Scottie” for nothing, declared around 1954 that we wouldn’t buy a television because they’d soon be making colour ones.)

I alerted the Victorian Society to the imminent demise of this unusual building, to be told that no-one had any idea how unusual it was, because no survey of Sheffield cinemas had been attempted.

So I tramped around the city checking out the survivors and was briefly the greatest living expert on the subject until Richard Ward produced his book In Memory of Sheffield Cinemas (Sheffield City Libraries 1988).  (I happen to know that Richard wanted the book to be titled A Memory… but made the common error of dictating his intention over the phone.)

I’ll always have a soft spot for the Pavilion, not so much because it was part of my childhood as because it kick-started my interest in the architecture of the entertainment industry, and led me to run continuing-education courses and study tours about pubs, theatres, cinemas and the seaside under the umbrella title ‘Fun Palaces’.

And that has proved to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of all my history work.

The demolition of the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe is illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

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

Huntsman’s Gardens

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Huntsman's Gardens Schools, Attercliffe, Sheffield: central hall during demolition (1980)

Huntsman’s Gardens Schools, Attercliffe, Sheffield: central hall during demolition (1980)

When the Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group visited the historic buildings of Attercliffe in 2010, one of the buildings they couldn’t see – being thirty years too late – was my early alma mater, Huntsman’s Gardens Schools, demolished as part of the Sheffield Development Corporation’s wholesale clearance of parts of the valley in preparation for the World Student Games event in 1981.

The name Huntsman’s Gardens commemorates the schools’ location alongside the Attercliffe works (established in 1770) of the inventor of crucible steel, Benjamin Huntsman (1704-1776). Round the corner on Worksop Road, the Britannia Inn still carries on its gable the date 1772 in numerals reputedly cast by Huntsman.

The huge school complex was one of the magnificent series of Sheffield School Board structures designed by Charles J Innocent and Thomas Brown from 1871 onwards.  Huntsman’s Gardens dated from 1884, and was an impressive example of the so-called Prussian model of building classrooms with glass partitions around a central hall so that the headteacher could supervise teaching and learning across the whole school without patrolling corridors in crepe soles.

Huntsman’s Gardens, like many of the surviving Innocent & Brown schools across Sheffield, was characterised by solid walls, faced in stone, and huge, high windows to make the most of the light in a polluted industrial environment.  My memories of school in the 1950s include whole days when the lights remained on in classrooms because the sun couldn’t penetrate the smog.

Most memorable of all, however, especially for a seven-year-old, was the enormous height of the school hall.  I don’t ever remember feeling cold, but I’ve no idea how such an enormous space was heated.

In 1980 the building was razed without much comment.  If it had somehow survived a couple more decades, it would have presented an interesting challenge for redevelopment – bigger than the Leeds Corn Exchange (now a shopping centre), far more dramatic than any other surviving Victorian school for miles around.

The Victorian Society South Yorkshire group’s publication Building Schools for Sheffield, 1870-1914 is obtainable from http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/publications/sheffield-schools.

The demolition of Huntsman’s Gardens Schools is illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.