Category Archives: Survivals & Revivals: past views of English architecture

Gothic New York: Woolworth Building

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Woolworth Building, New York City

Woolworth Building, New York City

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (1913) in downtown New York, not far from Wall Street, is an unusual creation – a Gothic Revival skyscraper.

This cathedral of commerce was financed solely by the proceeds of the original five-and-dime stores, its entire cost, $13 million, paid for in cash.

Frank W Woolworth’s design brief was for something like the Houses of Parliament but higher than the Metropolitan Life Tower, which is exactly what Cass Gilbert provided.

It reaches sixty storeys, 793 feet, and remained the world’s tallest building until the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930.

It epitomises the technological advances of its period – curtain-wall construction on a load-bearing steel frame and an inevitable reliance on elevators for circulation.  Its three-storey lobby, of gold marble and glass mosaic, is breathtaking, and tinged with an endearing humour:  among the carvings can be found Cass Gilbert holding a model of the building and Frank Woolworth counting out the nickels and dimes that paid for it.

It was sold in 1998 for $126 million to the Witkoff Group:  its tenant is the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

There is a rich collection of illustrations and a brief description of the Woolworth Building at http://www.nyc-architecture.com/SCC/SCC019.htm.

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

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

 

Gothic New York: St John the Divine Cathedral

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St John the Divine Cathedral, New York City (1989)

St John the Divine Cathedral, New York City (1989)

The Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York City, is a game of two halves.  It was begun to the Romanesque/Byzantine style designs of Heins & LaFarge, in 1892, and grew so slowly that the rumour circulated it was being built by an old man and his son.  In fact it was nineteen years before the choir and crossing could be consecrated.

The problem of roofing the vault until the central tower could be built was resolved by inserting a Guastavino tile dome (similar to the Registry Building at Ellis Island and the concourse of Grand Central Terminal) at a cost of $8,500:  this temporary expedient, completed in only fifteen weeks, is still in place.  The Guastavino family were also responsible for the vaulting of the whole church, and of the crypt which supports the nave, crossing and choir floors.

Oddly, the Heins & LaFarge design was summarily abandoned in 1909 in favour of a longer French Gothic plan by Ralph Adams Cram, so that the nave and west front are being continued to the designs of his firm, Cram & Ferguson.  The junction between the two is abrupt, and can never be wholly successful.

By the autumn of 1941 the entire length of the nave was complete.  Construction was stopped when the United States entered World War II, and by the time work resumed in 1982 it proved necessary to import stonemasons from England to apprentice unemployed Harlem youths in the traditional skills.

When it’s finally completed, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, centre of the Episcopal archdiocese of New York, will be the largest (but not the longest) Gothic church in the world – 601 feet long, 320 feet wide across the transepts, with a nave vault 124 feet high.

But it can never be an entirely Gothic church without destroying and rebuilding the whole of the east end.

The Cathedral of St John the Divine website is at http://www.stjohndivine.org.

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

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

 

Do-it-yourself castle

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Stainborough Castle, South Yorkshire

Stainborough Castle, South Yorkshire

Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby, was furious when he failed to inherit the estate of Wentworth Woodhouse.

He bought the nearby Stainborough estate and had the family earldom revived in his favour.

Even after he’d tacked on to the existing house a grand baroque wing gazing east towards Wentworth Woodhouse he felt a need to impress his superiority over his Watson neighbours, so he built himself a ruined castle, Stainborough Castle, which its inscription describes as “rebuilt” in 1730.

Mining subsidence has made it even more of a ruin than Lord Strafford had intended, and it has in recent years been tidied up.

It’s the literal high spot of the longest walk round Wentworth Castle Gardens [http://www.wentworthcastle.org/view.asp?id=145], which takes in a sample of the other garden buildings that Lord Strafford and his son scattered about the estate – the Corinthian Temple, Archer’s Hill Gate and Lady Mary’s Obelisk which commemorates the bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her encouragement of inoculation against smallpox.

The restored garden has outstanding interpretation boards at regular intervals, so that it’s possible to understand the significance of near and distant features at leisure, strolling through a succession of small gardens, informal wildernesses and formal linear walks.

At a greater distance – up to four miles – there are walks around the park, taking in a greater series of monuments, including the Queen Anne Monument (1734), the Rotunda (1742-6) and the Duke of Argyle Monument.

Wentworth Castle Gardens has a superb visitor centre with a café and a programme of events throughout the year:  http://www.wentworthcastle.org/diary.asp.  Christmas is particularly attractive:  Santa feeds the deer, answers letters and hands out presents in his grotto, while parents are kept occupied with mulled wine.

There’s something for everybody, almost every day of the year.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  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.

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

Deer little house

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Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

When you look out of the upstairs windows of the south front of Scampston Hall your eye is caught by a red-brick castellated lodge in the distance.

This is Deer Park Lodge, built by John Carr of York in Gothick style c1768 as an eye-catcher across the lake.  Originally, it was stuccoed in white, so that it stood out from the now-vanished forest behind it.

As well as being an ornament to the view, the lodge served a practical function.  To each side of the central bay were arcades to provide shelter when the deer came to feed.  Behind the building was a modest cottage in which the deer-keeper and his family lived.

The three-sided bay, with its castellated gable embellished with a trefoil, contains two grand rooms, connected by a steep, straight staircase.  Both have marble fireplaces and were decorated, apparently, with marbled paper.  The upper room, where visitors from the great house would take tea and admire the view, has a delicate plaster ceiling decorated with hunting horns and sheet music.

The current owners, David and Jane Crease, have carefully restored the lodge, and Jane explains how the three sides of the bay offered completely different views – the forest to the right (nature), the house straight ahead (culture) and the mill to the left (commerce).

Mr & Mrs Crease entertained the members of the Art Fund South Yorkshire to tea on their way back from an art day in Scarborough.  It’s a rare privilege to enjoy a sumptuous afternoon tea sitting outside the lodge gazing across the lake towards Scampston Hall in the distance.

One of the ironies of an eye-catcher is that it commands at least as good a view as the view it belongs to.  No doubt that’s why the St Quentins and their descendants, the Legards, drove over to admire the big house in its setting.

Scampston Deer Park Lodge is a private residence and is not open to the public.

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

 

Strawberry Hill forever

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Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Horace Walpole (1717-97) didn’t expect his house at Strawberry Hill to last much longer than he did:  he built in plaster and papier-mâché and decorated his “little plaything-house” with wallpaper.

The house that gave its name to a style, “Strawberry Hill Gothic”, was for amusement only, so small that one of his visitors, Lady Townsend, declared, “Lord God!  Jesus!  What a house!  It is just such a house as the parson’s where the children lie at the end of the bed.”

As a reaction to the stern mansion at Houghton in Norfolk built by his father, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, and indeed to his own town house off Piccadilly, Walpole extended Strawberry Hill between 1749 and 1776 asymmetrically, as if built over centuries, because he was “fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry”.

He commissioned a group of friends as his “committee of taste” – among them John Chute (1701-1776) and Richard Bentley (1708-1782) – to advise on designs based on medieval originals.  This is why the chimneypiece in the library imitates John of Eltham’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, and that in the Holbein Chamber is based on Archbishop Warham’s tomb at Canterbury, while the gallery ceiling is derived from the side aisles of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey.

The house was a cabinet of curiosities, a Schatzkammer, filled with every kind of object from Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat to the gilded armour of the French King Francis I, James I’s gloves to a lock of Edward IV’s hair “cut from his corpse in St George’s Chapel at Windsor”.    Stripped of Walpole’s collections in a sale of 1842, its rooms currently stand virtually empty.  Yet they have the unmistakable feeling of what Walpole called “gloomth”, which inspired his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765), an important milestone on the road which leads to Frankenstein, Dracula and Hogwarts.

For a building that was outrageously against the prevalent architectural fashion, it was the object of insatiable curiosity.  Walpole was so pressured by visitors that he issued timed tickets.  “Never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court,” he wrote to a friend.  “Everyone will live in it but you.”  He declared that he should marry his housekeeper, because her gratuities were such that she had more money than he did.

Strawberry Hill, for many years the core of a Catholic teacher-training college, is now – at a cost of £9 million – as bright and crisp as Horace Walpole would have remembered it.

Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, is open to the public by timed ticket:  see http://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/visit.php.  The café, called The Committee of Taste, is superlative:  I couldn’t bring myself to eat the cheesecake until I’d photographed it:

Cheesecake

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

Amazing Grace

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Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, up on the heights of Nob Hill above downtown San Francisco, is an uplifting space.

It’s a pure thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, built of concrete between 1928 and 1964 to the designs of Lewis Parsons Hobart (1873-1954) to replace a predecessor destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.  Hobart’s wife was a cousin of William H Crocker, the donor of the site.

In the tradition of much older churches, the interior of Grace Cathedral is an essay and a narrative, with murals by Jan Henryk De Rosen, and stained glass by Charles Connick of Boston and Gabriel Loire of Chartres, two of the greatest stained-glass designers of the twentieth century.  The bronze Ghiberti west doors are the reproductions that the Nazis made of the Florentine originals which they removed during the Second World War.  The 44-bell carillon in the north tower was built by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon, and donated by a Methodist dentist from Penzance, Nathaniel T Coulson:  it was first played in 1940.

It’s a beautiful building to visit – light, spacious, peaceful, welcoming.  The glass tints the interior blue, Gabriel Loire’s preferred colour because, he said, “La paix donne la joie.” (Peace gives joy.)  There are two labyrinths, one on the forecourt and the other at the west end of the nave – mysterious aids to meditation based on the medieval original at Chartres.

There’s something curiously Californian about this inclusive, relaxed place that takes itself seriously with delicacy.

The Grace Cathedral website is at http://www.gracecathedral.org.

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

Gothic New York: St Patrick’s Cathedral

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St Patrick's Cathedral, New York City

St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City

When building began on the site of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1858, New York City’s Catholics complained about how far out of town it was.  The cathedral fills the block between 50th and 51st Streets, Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue.

In mid-Victorian times the area was barely populated;  now it’s in the midst of “the most expensive street in the world”, directly opposite the Rockefeller Center, from where it’s possible to gaze down on the 333-feet-high spires of James Renwick Jnr’s very conventional English and French Gothic Revival church.

The church, built of brick faced with white marble, was dedicated in 1879, and the towers added in 1888;  Charles T Mathews designed the Lady Chapel addition which was finished in 1906.  It was eventually consecrated, having being declared free from debt, on October 5th 1911:  it had cost, up to that time, around $4 million.

The impact of twentieth-century development on its surroundings is stunning.  Yet, inside its dark portal, the seductive darkness of soaring Gothic arches provides a dramatic sense of entering a different world with different priorities to the world outside.

Over the years it has been the centre of solemn events not only for New York’s Catholics but for its wider population:  here in June 1968 Edward Kennedy eulogised his dead brother Robert, the New York Senator;  here also were ceremonies to remember the victims and heroes of 9/11.

Somehow, the thick walls and dark glass shut out the noise of Manhattan.  Here is a haunting, dignified, echoing space in which to rest and be thankful.

I’ve visited New York City repeatedly, and even if I’m only there for a day or two I always try to visit St Patrick’s.

The St Patrick’s Cathedral website is at http://www.saintpatrickscathedral.org.

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

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

 

Camp castle

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Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Tattershall Castle is a designer castle – practically capable of being defended but primarily intended to make a statement.

It was built by Ralph, Lord Cromwell (1403-1455) who did very well out of the post of Treasurer of England under King Henry VI.  His badge of office was the tasselled purse and crossed money-bags.  Tattershall was one of his five residences.

He was described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “a tenacious man with a great gift for administration, a tidy mind, a faith in accurate records, and an ability to steer a safe course amid the intrigues of the age of Henry VI.”  He built the huge brick Great Tower within the inner bailey of an earlier castle, and established a college of clergy – the customary medieval insurance against damnation – to worship in the adjacent parish church.  In his will he asked his executors to restore to their previous owners lands worth almost £5,000 “for conscience’s sake”.

The Great Tower is a series of splendid state apartments, stacked one on top of the other rather than laid out in a line.  From the roof it’s possible not only to drop missiles on unwelcome visitors, but to see the towers of Lincoln Cathedral and Boston Stump.

This medieval skyscraper was characterised by the guide-book writer Dr M W Thompson as reminiscent of “the self-dramatisation so characteristic of fifteenth-century life”.  The finished building would have been startling to contemporary eyes, just as its surviving remains are impressive to ours.  It was designed for someone who had a clear idea of the effect he wished to create.

It’s possible that the whole tower was originally rouged with ochre.  It’s not so much a masculine building as a butch one.

We owe its survival to a particularly quirky personality in early twentieth-century politics, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon (1859-1925), who went through life, poor man, encumbered with the anonymous undergraduate ditty –

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My face is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.

This much derided, stiff, unhappy man, when he wasn’t working incredibly hard in the “Great Game” of British politics in which he rose to be Viceroy of India (1898-1905) and Foreign Secretary (1919-24), purchased the derelict site of Tattershall Castle in 1911, renovated the Great Tower, restored the moats and reinstated the original fireplaces which had been crated up ready for sale to the USA.  His action provoked the passing of the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913.  He bequeathed Tattershall to the National Trust, along with Bodiam Castle in Kent which he bought in 1916.

Tattershall Castle is open to the public throughout the year, but not every day:  see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-tattershallcastle for up-to-date details.  The ladies of the parish serve excellent tea and cakes in the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity most days between Easter and the end of September:  check at http://www.httf.org/heritage.html.

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

 

Midland Grand renaissance

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Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

St Pancras Renaissance Hotel: grand staircase (2011)

How very satisfying to see the former Midland Grand Hotel finally restored and fully operational as the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which opened in May 2011.

And what a pleasure to be shown round by the Hotel Historian, Royden Stock.  Royden has been associated with the building throughout its recent restoration, and has an unrivalled archaeological knowledge of the building.

I learnt from him, for instance, that English Heritage insistence that the grand staircase should be restored to its 1901 decoration, red with gold fleur-de-lis, obscures the much lighter original scheme, cream with a dado rail and scroll decoration to echo Skidmore’s ironwork.

He also reports that what were thought to be iron spandrels underneath the stair-treads are in fact fibrous plaster, which makes me wonder whether George Gilbert Scott would ever sanction such deceit, or whether they too date from 1901.

There is, oddly, no photograph of the staircase dating before 1901.

The original stair carpet was, unsurprisingly, unusable and a sample length woven to the original colours proved wildly garish because it was designed for the original cream colour-scheme, so the fitted carpet that stretches three floors up and down the staircase and reappears elsewhere in the building is newly woven to the faded colours of the original.

There’s an inevitable tension in taking a historic tour of a working hotel.  Royden Stock is adept at circumnavigating ongoing events to show visitors on any particular day as much of the building as possible.  He can’t, of course, provide access to the private apartments on the Euston Road wing of the building.  The smart advice, from a man who ought to know, is that tours booked at the weekend are likely to be more comprehensive than those in the middle of the week.

The refreshments at the end of the tour were worth waiting for, though the service was several stars short of the Renaissance aspiration, perhaps because the hotel was extremely busy on the day I visited.  Some members of my group were put out by this, but I considered Royden’s guiding alone was worth £20, and to me the pot of tea and an empty croissant was incidental – welcome, but not serious hospitality.

Royden Stock’s comprehensive knowledge of St Pancras can be found at Royden Stock – The Sage of St. Pancras.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture on St Pancras Station and the Midland Grand Hotel please click here.

Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral (Pugin version)

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Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Everton, Liverpool (1990)

Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Everton, Liverpool (1990)

Almost as soon as Liverpool became the centre of a re-established Catholic diocese in 1850, the first bishop, Alexander Goss, commissioned Edward Welby Pugin to design a magnificent Gothic cathedral which was to stand on Everton Brow.

There is an image of E W Pugin’s perspective view of the planned St Edward’s Cathedral at https://www.liverpoolmetrocathedral.org.uk/the-first-cathedral.  The complete building would have been a dignified cruciform structure with a tall tower and spire, providing a fine landmark overlooking the Mersey.

From the Wirral bank of the Mersey, or from a vessel in the river, you can pinpoint its location behind and slightly to the north of the existing St George’s Parish Church

Building began in 1853, and stopped again three years later because of the pressure to provide churches, schools and welfare for the huge population of Irish and other immigrants that flooded into mid-nineteenth century Liverpool.  There simply wasn’t the money to spare for grand building projects.

All that was ever built of Pugin’s great cathedral was the Lady Chapel and its two side chapels, and these were converted into an odd-looking parish church, Our Lady Immaculate, which stood on St Domingo Road until it was demolished in the early 1990s.

It was said at that time to be unsafe, though I felt – and still feel – that it was a pity that this relic of the early Victorian growth of Catholic Liverpool wasn’t somehow preserved.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

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