Category Archives: Sheffield’s Heritage

Praised with faint damns

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

After I first expressed an interest in the threatened St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I was shown the Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report, from which I quoted in Church going, which recommended the building for listing.

I’ve now seen the latest English Heritage advice-report rejecting that recommendation. The task of an English Heritage inspector is to evaluate the building in the context of its national significance, according to guidelines which are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/publications/docs/places_of_worship_final.pdf. At the end of these guidelines (p 20) is a comment that “while all listed buildings are of national importance, local factors may sometimes be of significance”.

St Hilda’s failed the tests when it was last inspected in October 2011. There’s more than a hint of de haut en bas about the inspector’s silky comments.

The architect, Leslie Moore, is described as a “junior partner” to his better-known father-in-law, which he would be, being the son-in-law. The original design of 1922 had a “strong resemblance” to Temple Moore’s St Mary, Nunthorpe, but the rather different building of 1935-8 is “simplified down” – as if an imitation is preferable to an adaptation while still not quite good enough.

It’s described as a “plain rectangular box”, which it certainly isn’t, “old-fashioned for [its] date”, built of red engineering brick which is “common”, like most of inter-war Sheffield, and the interior, embellished by George Pace, is “austere”. Ruth Harman and John Minnis clearly thought it merited an illustration in their Pevsner Architectural Guide Sheffield (2004), p 188.

All this suggests that if St Hilda’s has aesthetic worth, it belongs on a local list in “recognition of its architectural or historical importance and its value to the local community” [see https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/urban-design–conservation/locallisting-.html]. Somehow, it seems not to have been considered so far as a candidate for the local list.

It’s not for me to assert that the national inspector and the local planners are wrong about St Hilda’s. I think it’s a memorable, exciting, confident building that could once more be put to good use. None of those epithets is necessarily a criterion for listing.

It would be peevish to point to listed buildings in the locality that might compare with St Hilda’s, but it is pertinent to point to some of the interesting, attractive and potentially useful structures that Sheffield has lost over the decades when listed-building legislation has existed to protect the built environment – the Britannia Music Hall, Huntsman’s Gardens Schools and the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe.

While St Hilda’s stands, there’s a chance of saving it – and it’s worth saving, whether it’s worth listing or not.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Church going

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St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield: interior view towards liturgical east (December 2011)

Photo: Midlands Churchcrawler

I’ve learned more about the plight of St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield as a result of my earlier article.

It seems that the verbal information on which Matthew Saunders, Secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, based his report in the recent Newsletter was perhaps over-dramatic.

Recent images by an urban explorer show that though the building has indeed been repeatedly vandalised, the attempts at arson have not caused major damage, and that George Pace and Ron Sims’ screen and the eighteenth-century organ case from the bombed church of St James remain, battered but intact.

I sense that the vandals’ acrobatics on the roof could only have been motivated by a search for scrap: since the roof itself is tiled, the most likely source of scrap metal would have been the organ pipes, if they remained in situ.

The Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report on the building describes it as “striking…very ambitious…for its setting…[with] considerable townscape value” and in conclusion commented, “A fine church by an architect whose work deserves to be re-evaluated, with a particularly good and dramatic…interior.”

It ends: “The Council has previously voiced concern about the number of churches of this period being considered for redundancy, and thought this church of a quality comparable to many listed churches.”

A private individual has lodged an application for emergency listing with English Heritage, making a judgement that there remains enough about the building to justify listed-building protection.

I can understand entirely why the Church of England authorities are anxious to divest themselves of liability for a redundant structure. They have enough work to do in their Christian mission.

However, I don’t see why that must involve destroying the local heritage. I’ve yet to hear of any positive proposal to use the site in any new way.

St Hilda’s, prominent on its ridge about Firth Park, belongs to the locality. It offers substantial, well-built space for local people’s social activities.

If it remains standing, someone in the future can find a worthwhile use for it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for ever.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

And with it would go a relatively economical opportunity to offer local people somewhere to congregate, which St Hilda’s was for decades before, during and after the Second World War. Philip Larkin, in his poem ‘Church going’ [The Less Deceived, 1955], asked – When churches will fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into…? “Rubble” was not the answer he was looking for.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Losing a landmark

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St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

I learned from that fountain of useful information and news, the Ancient Monuments Society Newsletter, that the only historic building I can see from my office window is about to disappear.

St Hilda’s Parish Church, Shiregreen is an interesting inter-war brick church on a literally outstanding site. It stands on an abrupt cliff-edge alongside the Flower Estate, itself a notable landmark of early-twentieth century municipal housing [see Ruth Harman & John Minnis, Sheffield (Pevsner Architectural Guides 2004), pp 185-8, http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/cities/sheffield/the-flower-estate.html and http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/cities/sheffield/the-flower-estate/tour-part-2.html].

The church was designed by Leslie Moore (1883-1957) in 1935-8, presumably to serve the council estate and the slightly earlier community down the hill. Moore made clever use of an extremely steep site, building his nave above a community room, accessible by steep steps built into the hillside.

The interior was high quality: the white-and-gold classical gallery by the York architect George Pace (1915-1975) supported an eighteenth-century organ case with pipes brought from the blitzed city-centre church of St James.

St Hilda’s was closed, no doubt surplus to requirements, in 2007.

The Newsletter tells the regrettable tale of three arson attacks and some spectacularly energetic vandalism (which I suspect was an attempt at theft of lead organ-pipes). The only way intruders could penetrate the secured building was to climb on to the roof ridge and then drop down through an access door behind the bell turret. This is 35 metres above the sloping ground level.

I can’t help thinking that the athleticism and ingenuity behind such burglary would command a healthy wage in a healthy legitimate economy.

Apparently, the Church Commissioners and the Diocese of Sheffield have given up any attempt to save the building and intend it to be demolished.

This is a pity. The local community is not blessed with public spaces, or indeed social opportunities. The precipitous plot on which the church stands won’t be easy to redevelop. The views from the site are magnificent, but any replacement structure will need high-quality design to deserve a place in the landscape.

There’s an obvious argument for mothballing St Hilda’s in the hope of better economic times, sometime in the indefinable future. But it’s only practical if there’s some guarantee that the local villains won’t keep trashing the place, and possibly killing themselves, in the process.

The saddest fact of all, of course, is that it’s a fine building nobody wants. It’s not the first time that Sheffield has lost a useful historic building because no-one – owners, city planners, local amenity groups, interested individuals like me – took sufficient notice to appreciate its value [See Rue Britannia].

I can’t imagine why St Hilda’s isn’t listed. And if you don’t use it, you lose it.

A detailed examination of the challenges facing the Anglican Church in north Sheffield is posted at http://sheffield.anglican.org/attachments/275_Final%20Report.pdf.

The Ancient Monuments Society can be contacted at http://www.ancientmonumentssociety.org.uk. The Twentieth Century Society, which has a brief to support and conserve buildings dating from after 1914, is at http://www.c20society.org.uk.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Rue Britannia

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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 was used for car sales, and now, as part of the National Emergency Services Museum, is home to the Tyne-class lifeboat The City of Sheffield.

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.

Not quite paradise

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Paradise Square, Sheffield

For all its reputation as a gritty Victorian town, bombed and repeatedly redeveloped over recent generations, Sheffield is not short of Georgian buildings, but it has only one Georgian square – Paradise Square (1736 and 1771-c1790), down the hill from the parish church, now the Anglican Cathedral.

In fact, substantial parts of Paradise Square are neo-neo-Georgian, tactfully reinstated after World War II bombing by the long-established Sheffield architectural partnership, Hadfield Cawkwell Davidson in 1963-6. According to Ruth Harman & John Minnis’ Pevsner Architectural Guide, Sheffield (Yale University Press 2004), nos 18 and 26 are almost entirely rebuilt and no 10 was refaced “in ill-chosen brick” c1985.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of this steeply sloping space, once a bustling market known as “Pot Square”, remains evocative of when Sheffield was a metal-bashing cutlery town, vibrant with religious and political dissent.

Here is where sermons and turbulent meetings took place, sometimes ending in violence. In 1779 John Wesley preached here to “the largest congregation I ever saw on a weekday”.

There are repeated claims of audiences of eight to twelve thousand people crammed into this space [http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=6534].

Really? Twelve thousand is the capacity of the Sheffield Arena, an indoor space far bigger than Paradise Square with raked seating as well as a flat floor.

Who counts these crowds? And how?

Let’s simply assume that when elections were much livelier affairs than nowadays, this elegant Georgian space, now the exclusive home of lawyers, surveyors and my accountant, would have been packed to capacity, and when the Chartists cut up rough and “the town was kept in great agitation the whole night” it would have been a dangerous place to hang around.

Court adjourned

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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.

Horseless garage

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Cavendish Buildings, West Street, Sheffield

It’s remarkable how much built history is literally invisible.

Among John Minnis’ slides when he talked to the Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group about ‘Early Automobile Architecture’ was one image of my native Sheffield that made me double-take.

John knows Sheffield because he co-authored the Pevsner Architectural Guide on the city.

He pointed out Cavendish Buildings on West Street as an example of an early purpose-built motor-sales and repair shop. I thought it was a wine-bar, until I remembered that it used to belong to the Kenning Motor Group. In fact, I once hired a car there.

Cavendish Buildings has a very fine, imposing terra-cotta façade, obviously designed in one piece but actually, by the date-stones on the semi-circular pediments, built in three stages, 1907, 1910 and 1919.

It was built for the Sheffield Motor Company Ltd with, according to Ruth Harman and John Minnis’ guide, showrooms at street level and, on the upper stories, one of those repositories of misspent youth, a billiard hall.

Contributors to the history forum http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=5408 relate that during the Second World War part of the upper level was occupied by the apparently lively Central Labour Working Men’s Club, and later the space was used by the Cavendish Dance Studio.

Until at least the 1970s there was a car hoist within the building, presumably serving repair shops on the first floor. To passers-by, of course, its original use had long been forgotten.

Now you can eat and drink at the Cavendish: http://www.screampubs.co.uk/thecavendishsheffield – even if you don’t qualify for student ID.

And you can see it in 3D at http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=6a8d33f318df7d744522e2cc67bda51&ct=mdsa.

Amazing.

Future meetings of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group are advertised at http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/south-yorkshire/forthcoming-events. Guests are welcome. The biscuits are excellent.

Corpulent feline

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The Fat Cat (former Alma Hotel), Alma Street, Sheffield

The Fat Cat is a Sheffield legend: https://www.thefatcat.co.uk/. It’s not the only award-winning real-ale pub in the city – there’s another round the corner on the next street – but it was the first, and it has a special place in the affections of beer-drinkers. It welcomes anyone who enjoys civilised traditional conviviality and home-cooked food within easy access of public transport – so you don’t have to drive home (though there’s ample car-parking if you do).

There was a Kelham Tavern on the site by the 1830s. After the street was named Alma Street to commemorate the Crimean battle of 1854, the pub was renamed the Alma Hotel.

The exact date of the present building is unclear: it’s of straightforward artisan construction, with a traditional bar inside. Though it has been extended, the only significant architectural alteration is the blocking of the original corner entrance door.

For many years it was crowded by surrounding housing and the noise and dirt of heavy industry. Now it’s much quieter.

The saving of the Alma Hotel was Stones’ Brewery’s failure to implement 1952 planning permission to extend the building, doubling the number of bedrooms to eight and creating an open-plan interior.

Because the building survived intact while the local community contracted, it was an ideal location for Dave Wickett and Bruce Bentley’s scheme to reintroduce traditional beers to Sheffield. They gave the building its current name when they opened in 1981 serving beers from independent breweries. The first pint was pulled by the much-loved Sheffield football legend, Derek Dooley.

Their policy has proved durable and enormously successful: good beer well served, home-cooked food ranging from carnivore to vegan, no piped music or gaming machines.

Dave Wickett became sole owner in 1989 and began brewing beer behind the pub the following year. Within ten years he built the Kelham Island Brewery next door, and now you can find his beer in real-ale pubs across the country, and buy bottles in Waitrose.

Dave Wickett died, aged 64, on May 16th 2012: Dave Wickett obituary | Beer | The Guardian. The Fat Cat is a memorial to a man who added a great deal to the sum of human happiness.

Iron curtain at the Abbeydale

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Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield: auditorium (1987)

While the Adelphi Cinema lay dark Sheffield’s other listed cinema building found a practical use as a performance building.

I’ve a soft spot for the Abbeydale Cinema. Though I only ever once saw a film there, I repeatedly visited it in the 1980s when it was an office-equipment showroom – an unexpected fate for a superannuated cinema. The company that bought it, A & F Drake Ltd, sold filing cabinets and office desks in the stalls and balcony, and separately operated the former ballroom and billiard hall in the basement as a snooker club. The Drakes and their manager, Ian Humphreys, repeatedly allowed me to take adult-education groups to see the place from top to bottom, and on one occasion Ian McMillan and Martyn Wiley broadcast Radio Sheffield’s Saturday morning show live from the Abbeydale auditorium.

Because the Drakes had the imagination to find a productive use for the building – they regarded it as a better customer attraction than an anonymous box on a trading estate – it survived intact long enough to attract the attention of a Friends’ group who are restoring it as a venue for film and amateur dramatics. Cinemas in the 1920s featured live performance as well as silent movies, and the Abbeydale had an organ – long ago destroyed – and still has a full-scale stage with wings, fly-tower and dressing-rooms.

Even more interesting is the iron safety-curtain, which has remained in situ even after Drakes jacked up the stage-floor six feet to create more space for their wares. This must date back to the 1920s, but its unique interest is the complete set of painted advertisements that faced audiences between films. Clifford Shaw, the greatest expert on Sheffield cinemas, has dated the existing adverts to the 1950s. Ian Humphreys observed to me in the 1980s that all but one of the businesses advertised had by that time folded. The Cinema Theatre Association reports that, to the best of their knowledge, no other cinema safety-curtain survives with contemporary advertisements, and for this reason is supporting the proposal to upgrade the listing.

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

Picture palace gathers dust

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Former Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1985)

The Adelphi Cinema (1920) on Vicarage Road, Attercliffe, is one of Sheffield’s two listed cinemas alongside the more prominent and interesting Abbeydale Picture House on the other side of the city.

Originally located up a cul-de-sac, it has an interesting façade of buff and blue faience with a stubby little dome, designed to catch the eye. Now that the surrounding buildings have been cleared, it’s more visible from the main road and forms one of a group of historic buildings alongside the former Attercliffe Baths (1879), the former Attercliffe Library (1894) and one of Attercliffe’s two Burton’s stores.

All these survive alongside the site of the Don Valley Stadium, formerly Brown Bayley’s steelworks, and now redeveloped. There is an opportunity waiting to be taken to develop the possibilities of this location. The Baths have been converted into a largely sterile office and conference facility, which at least safeguards the fabric, and the Library has recently opened as a splendid café and restaurant [Sheffield | Restauraunt & Bar | The Library by Lounge | Attercliffe] but the Adelphi remains dark.

The Adelphi closed as a cinema in 1967, and operated as a bingo club until well into the 1980s. There was a project to take advantage of its elegant classical interior as a gay club, and eventually it was transformed into a rock venue. It was listed Grade II in 1996 but after a period as a music-teaching venue in 2000-2006 it fell into neglect.

By 2013 it was used as a storage facility, and someone went to great trouble to strip out the original plasterwork.

This was an object-lesson in how not to treat a listed building.

Yet the Adelphi stands on the main road between Sheffield, Rotherham and the M1 motorway. There’s no shortage of car-parking.

It’s a possibility waiting to be turned into a practicality.

Plans are afoot to rescue the Adelphi: The new Adelphi | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

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

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