Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

Forward movement

Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, London [© Gt-man]

Hugh Price Hughes (1857-1902) – Methodist preacher, orator, founder of The Methodist Times newspaper and leader of the influential West London Mission – realised that a substantial underclass of needy people were unwilling to go to church and therefore cut off from support which could improve their lives.

He wanted to steer Nonconformists away from a preoccupation with individual salvation towards practical efforts to make poor people’s lives better.

People who only owned one set of clothes were disinclined to mix with those who had a “Sunday best” outfit, and those who avoided religious services often assumed that churches and chapels were populated by snobs and hypocrites.

Supported by the Hull flour-miller Joseph Rank (1854-1943), Hughes initiated the “Forward Movement” to establish city- and town-centre Methodist missions that didn’t look like churches from the outside and felt like theatres or concert halls within – auditoria with facilities for music, variety performances and eventually films that could equally serve for worship and entertainment.

These “Central Halls” became ubiquitous in late-Victorian Britain: DMBI: A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland.

The most magnificent of all was the Westminster Central Hall, built in a baroque style that distinguishes it from the gothic Abbey which stands directly opposite. It is a more modern building than it looks, constructed around a reinforced concrete frame, with a huge domed ceiling above the 2,300-seat central space.

It was designed by Edwin Alfred Rickards FRIBA (1872–1920) and was constructed 1905-11 at a cost of just over a million pounds.

It replaced the disreputable Royal Aquarium (built 1876; demolished 1903) where, according to Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson’s Lost Theatres of London (1968), “unaccompanied ladies promenaded through the hall in search of male companionship”, and the slightly less risqué Imperial Theatre (demolished 1907).

The Methodist Central Hall has a track record of celebrity events. It was the venue for the inaugural meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, during which the congregation worshipped at the Coliseum Theatre adjacent to Trafalgar Square, and the second public performance of a version of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

There were expressions of Methodist disapproval when the Hall applied for a licence to sell alcohol in 2005.

Nevertheless, the Central Hall is true to its founder’s mission, combining regular worship with an energetic contribution to public life.

Manchester Oxford Road station

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I must have travelled through, or changed trains at, Manchester Oxford Road station hundreds of times since my university days, but although I was conscious of its curious architecture I never got round to photographing it until recently.

Its laminated timber arches bear a passing resemblance to the Sydney Opera House (which is pre-cast concrete). There’s nothing else quite like it in the British railway system.

The line through Oxford Road has been a vital transport link and a notorious bottleneck from its opening in 1849 to the present day.

It was constructed by the Manchester, South Junction & Altrincham Railway to connect the developing railways south and east of Manchester from what is now Manchester Piccadilly (originally London Road) to the west-facing Liverpool & Manchester Railway, as well as extending rail lines into Cheshire.

The “South Junction” is in fact the 1½-mile viaduct that makes that connection. Though the viaduct carried double track there was only one through platform at Oxford Road, alongside a west-facing terminal stub, and while the station buildings were renewed in 1876 the platform arrangement remained until a further rebuilding in 1903-04.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the MSJ&AR was piggy-in-the-middle to contentious rivals, the London & North Western and the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire (later Great Central) railways, and improvements took decades to accomplish, exasperating the millions of passengers who were obliged to put up with its tired facilities.

After 1922 the MSJ&AR was jointly owned by the London Midland & Scottish and the London & North Eastern railways. Electric multiple-unit trains improved the comfort and speed of the passenger service in 1931, but the station itself remained unmodernised until 1960.

British Railways ultimately had no alternative but to redesign and rebuild the whole station in 1959-60, despite concerns about the structural condition of the 1849 viaduct.

The solution was to build in lightweight laminated timber, hence the adventurous and spectacular conoid shell structure which provides cover without supporting columns on the curved alignment of the trackbed.

It was designed by the British Railways London Midland Region architect, William Robert Headley. His other designs for the Region, such as Coventry (1959-62) and Stafford (1961-62), are markedly rectilinear, yet he collaborated at Oxford Road with the furniture designer Max Clendinning (1924-2020). His other laminated timber structure, the porte-cochère at Crewe station (1963) was replaced after twenty years.

Manchester Oxford Road is an attractive, ingenious, practical structure, deservedly listed Grade II. Unfortunately, like many post-war innovative structures, it has needed repeated renovation. It was last refurbished in 2004, and will presumably need further treatment in future.

There’s an excellent detailed description of the station at The Wonderful World of Wood (Manchester Oxford Road station, Greater Manchester, UK) – The Beauty of Transport.

Great Court

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The British Museum is an all-encompassing treasure house that has collected art and artefacts since its inception in 1753. It has eight million individual items from all over the world but the one experience that always takes my breath away is the light, spacious, uncompromisingly modern space that is the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, opened by Her Majesty in December 2000.

The Museum’s acquisitiveness has repeatedly overstuffed its premises and sections of the collections have been hived off to create other celebrated London museums and galleries – the National Gallery (1824), the Natural History Museum (1881) and the British Library at St Pancras (1997).

When the late seventeenth-century Old Montagu House, its original home, could take no more contents the architect Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867) designed a neoclassical structure around a quadrangle, which was constructed between 1823 and 1852.

For its day, it was an ideal base for a national museum with a worldwide collection, but as the inexorable pressure of acquisitions mounted, the central courtyard would sooner or later have to be sacrificed.

In particular, King George IV’s 1823 donation of most of his father George III’s library, added to his grandfather George II’s original 1757 bequest of his Old Royal Library, came with Parliamentary confirmation that the British Museum should act as a legal deposit library, entitled to a copy of every book published in the country. That’s a lot of books.

After thirty years, Sir Robert Smirke’s younger brother, Sydney Smirke (1797-1877), was commissioned to create the Round Reading Room (1854-57) in the courtyard, and the spaces between his circular bookshelves and the inner walls of his brother’s buildings were filled with three storeys of iron bookstacks which eventually extended to twenty-five miles of shelving. There were table spaces for 302 readers at a time.

This celebrated, much-loved space was the birthplace of the works of a pantheon of writers, from Karl Marx to Mahatma Ghandi, Rudyard Kipling to Virginia Woolf. Vladimir Lenin signed in under the name Jacob Richter, as if he’d got something to hide.

Indeed the Reading Room dome recalls the Pantheon in Rome, though it’s actually a couple of feet smaller (140 feet). Its ceiling is made of papier-mâché suspended from the structural cast-iron shell.

The British Museum’s library collections were transferred in 1997 to the new British Library at St Pancras, designed by Colin St John Wilson (1922-2007) and his wife M J Long (1939-2008), leaving the Reading Room without a purpose.

The architects Foster & Partners developed a 1970s scheme by Colin St John Wilson to clear the surrounding clutter of stacks and other structures to create a circulation space serving the entire site.

This required ingenuity, because the Reading Room didn’t have walls: the bookshelves that readers knew actually backed on to the stacks.

A plain white wall now embraces Sydney Smirke’s great study space, which has been restored and was used first for exhibitions and later as the home of the Museum’s archive.

Brief public tours of the Reading Room have been restarted. Pre-booking is required and photography is not allowed: Visit | British Museum.

The pièce de resistance, a triumph of late twentieth-century architecture and engineering, is the tessellated glass roof of the Great Court, designed and fabricated by the Austrian manufacturer Waagner-Biro, which had completed the Reichstag Dome in Berlin in 1999.

The Great Court is light, airy and relaxing, with space to sit down and enjoy refreshments from the café.

It’s London’s answer to I M Pei’s Louvre Pyramid.

Bradford Live

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Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, now Bradford Live: restaurant decorative detail (2025)

I was privileged recently to join a Cinema Theatre Association visit to Bradford Live, the newly-restored New Victoria Cinema (1930), which survived brutal alterations, persistent neglect and threats of demolition until it was rescued and impressively restored as a “world-class” concert venue.

It was, and is, a magnificent building. It opened on September 22nd 1930 with a spectacular ceremony that included the film Rookery Nook and much else. Its size ensured its physical and commercial survival through vicissitudes that have blown away many of its contemporaries.

It was designed by a Bradford architect, William Illingworth (1875-1955), and at its opening it was claimed to be the third largest cinema in England and the largest outside London.

Two of its London rivals of greater size, the Davis Theatre, Croydon (opened December 18th 1928; 3,925 seats) and the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle (opened December 22nd 1930; 3,500 seats) have both gone.

Comparisons, as the schoolboy said, are odorous. There were other 1930s cinemas with capacity for around four thousand patrons, some of which survive such as the Granada Cinema, Tooting (opened September 7th 1931; slightly less than 4,000 seats; currently a bingo club) and the Gaumont State Theatre, Kilburn (opened December 20th 1937; 4,004 seats; now a church).

William Illingworth provided Bradford with a vast 3,318-seat auditorium with a Wurlitzer organ, facing a stage 70ft wide × 45ft deep, alongside a ballroom, a 200-cover restaurant and a tea-room café. The auditorium decoration was dignified Italian Renaissance, while the comfortable, stylish front-of-house spaces included Art Deco features and warm, adventurous colour schemes.

Built for Provincial & Cinematograph Theatres, it was operated successively by the Gaumont and Odeon chains and prospered until the 1960s. In particular, its stage and audience capacity meant that every significant rock and pop performer, excepting only Elvis Presley, appeared in Bradford, from Bill Haley and the Comets and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Film and live performances in the auditorium ceased in 1968 – Rio Conchos and Tom Jones were the last shows.

The conversion to twin screens and bingo in 1968 was ferocious. The structure was sufficiently robust and there was so much space that the two cinemas were built on the circle and gallery, and the stalls became a huge bingo club. Most of Illingworth’s plaster decoration was ripped out, though a segment of the balcony plasterwork remained hidden in a void for decades. The ballroom – redundant for twenty years – became a third screen in 1988. Schemes to subdivide the building further in 1991 and 1994 came to nothing.

In July 2000 Odeon opened a multiplex at Thornbury, where 3,300 people (almost the original capacity of the New Victoria) could choose from sixteen different movies at any particular time of day. The game was up for the Odeon cinemas in Bradford and Leeds.

As the Odeon Bradford gradually deteriorated, local people got together to oppose its destruction. An exceptional campaigner, Norman Littlewood, with his wife Julie, founded the Bradford Odeon Rescue Group (BORG) in 2003. Its most spectacular demonstration was the occasion in 2007 when a thousand people joined hands and hugged the Odeon.

Schemes to demolish and redevelop came and went until, partly through the efforts of urban explorers, it became apparent that significant amounts of original decorative features survived behind the 1968 alterations.

There’s an extensive exploration of the building showing its condition in 2014 at BRADFORD ODEON STRIPPING OUT ~ AUTUMN 2014, which is narrated by Mark Nicholson, author of the compendious history of the place, The People’s Palace: the story of Bradford’s New Vic (Bradford Live 2022).

The building passed through the hands of a succession of entities until Bradford Live bought it from the city council for £1, and spent rather more than that – £50.5 million – on its transformation.

It’s a palimpsest – a document that’s been repeatedly erased and rewritten. Under the aegis of the Aedas Arts Team, William Illingworth’s surviving work has been restored and replicated, particularly in the ballroom and restaurant. Elsewhere the bare structure of two million bricks and one hundred tons of steel indicates the magnificence of the architect’s engineering: https://cdn.rt.emap.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/12/28135511/20181203_aat_designandaccessstatementpart1.pdf.

It will be performance, particularly music, that makes this place pay. The days when three thousand people will queue up to see the same movie at the same time are gone.

The crowded streets that hemmed in the New Victoria in 1930 have been opened out to create Centenary Square, so that Bradford Live sits alongside the Alhambra Theatre and the National Science & Media Museum, within a few minutes’ walk of St George’s Hall and on the doorstep of the University of Bradford campus.

Bradford is the City of Culture in 2025, and now that Trafalgar Entertainment has taken on the role of operator it’s clear that it will contribute much to the culture of the city for years to come: Show will go on as operator revealed for Bradford Live venue | TheBusinessDesk.com.

Bradford Live does not appear on Bradford’s list of listed buildings.

“The Pennsylvanian” – to Pittsburgh by rail

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Rather than take a humdrum flight into Pittsburgh, I travelled by rail from Philadelphia in 2017 along what’s now called the Keystone Corridor. It’s a much more meaningful experience.

The historic main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia crosses the forbidding Allegheny Mountains, passing through formerly prosperous steel towns that, when they fell on hard times, were identified as part of the Rust Belt.

Altoona, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s railway town, is still an important centre bristling with the works and sidings of the PRR’s successor, the freight operator Norfolk & Southern, and also the location of the Railroaders’ Memorial Museum.

Five miles west of Altoona lies the Horseshoe Curve, opened in 1854, a 220° curve which is so spectacular it’s a tourist attraction. The purpose-built observation park opened in 1879. On the train, the attendant alerts passengers with a PA announcement.

The Horseshoe Curve was part of a scheme to replace the Allegheny Portage Railroad, opened in 1834 to transport barges on the Pennsylvania Canal over the watershed. Unlike British canal inclines, such as Anderton and Foxton, the vessels were lifted out of the water and conveyed by rail on flat cars: Old Portage Railroad by George W. Storm – Allegheny Portage Railroad – Wikipedia. Charles Dickens described riding the Portage Railroad in American Notes for General Circulation (1842): Conquering the Alleghenies | Pennsylvania Center for the Book (psu.edu).

Johnstown has a powerful history – home of the Cambria Steel Company (founded 1852), the site of the notorious Johnstown Flood of 1889, a dam-failure which killed well over two thousand people, and the location of the Johnstown Inclined Plane of 1891, a funicular like Saltburn’s but big enough to carry a car.

Further on there are stops at Latrobe, birthplace of the banana split according to Wikipedia, and Greensburg, a coal town that seems to have reinvented itself more successfully than most, partly perhaps because it has a university campus.

Arrival in Pittsburgh is less than dignified: the two daily arrivals and two corresponding departures run into an annex beside Daniel H Burman’s magnificent Penn Station (1898-1902) which is now an apartment block.

However, a five-minute taxi transfer took me to the Omni William Penn Hotel, where I was speedily installed in a spacious and comfortable room with a vast bed, a generous bathroom and a walk-in closet (wardrobe) which could itself almost have taken a single bed.

The William Penn is an illustrious, civilised landmark in Pittsburgh, opened in 1916 by a consortium that included the much-disliked Henry Clay Frick, and host to a succession of US Presidents from Hoover onwards: https://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/pittsburgh-william-penn.

Barack Obama, apparently, was the first president to be barred from the top-floor presidential suite because his security people insist on occupying the floors above and below him.

His successor appears never to have darkened the doorstep. Perhaps he owns or leases some place else.

The tailor of taste

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Burton’s Building, 783-787 Attercliffe Road, Sheffield

Burton’s Building, 582-588 Attercliffe Road, Sheffield

Burton’s Building, 783-787 Attercliffe Road, Sheffield: entrance detail © Simon Hollis

My mate Simon had an opportunity recently to inspect the interior of the former Burton’s shop at 783-787 Attercliffe Road, Sheffield and sent me a collection of images. The shop exterior is intact though time-worn, and still bears decorative features that can be restored. The interior, like the Banners department store a couple of hundred yards away, was simply a space for shop fittings, most of which have disappeared.

The Burton tailoring empire was founded by a remarkable man, a Russian Jew born Meshe David Osinsky (1885-1952), who emigrated to Britain at the start of the twentieth century with £100 to his name and hardly a word of English.

He began as an itinerant pedlar, and opened his first shop at Holywell Cross, Chesterfield in 1904. From there he expanded to Mansfield and then Sheffield. He married in 1909 and started his family in a modest but respectable cul-de-sac, Violet Bank Road in Nether Edge.

The men’s suits he sold were bought in at first, initially off-the-peg until 1906 when he offered a bespoke made-to-measure service. By 1910 he moved to Leeds to manufacture his own garments, and in the 1920s his Hudson Road premises became the largest clothing factory in Europe with 10,500 employees.

His identity became grand as his business flourished: his name was Morris Burton by 1909 when he applied for British citizenship; he quickly changed to Maurice Burton, and by 1917 he was Montague Maurice Burton. In 1931 he became Sir Montague Burton.

It’s possible, but not certain, that his suits originated the expression “full Monty” – jacket, waistcoat and two pairs of trousers.

In 1923 he hired the Leeds architect Harry Wilson to design the company’s new buildings on freehold sites in an instantly recognisable house style which in fact embraced a variety of materials and architectural features. There’s a detailed account of the company’s distinctive architecture at Burton’s ‘Modern Temples of Commerce’ | Building Our Past and A Spotter’s Guide to Montague Burton – the Tailor of Taste, Part 2 | Building Our Past. At the time of his death there were 616 Burton’s stores.

783-787 Attercliffe Road is typical: it’s located on a corner site next to the Adelphi Cinema. a white faience façade divided by pilasters fronts a steel-framed structure, and there were prominent reliefs (one of which remains intact) of the contemporary Burton logo with its strapline “The Tailor of Taste”. The first floor is top-lit because of the proximity of surrounding buildings, some of which have since been demolished. Surviving decorative features include the foundation stone laid by Stephen Austin Burton (possibly a grandson), the mosaic-floored entrance with original cast-metal glazing bars and at least one glass panel naming Burton stores in other towns and cities.

There’s also a slightly earlier, more restrained Burton’s building on the corner of Staniforth Road at 582-588 Attercliffe Road (1931). Stanley Howard Burton (Sir Montague’s eldest son) laid the foundation stone. Upstairs was at one time the Astoria Ballroom, and by 1944 it was a billiard saloon. It’s now occupied by a monumental mason, Madani Memorials.

The proximity of two Burton’s tailor’s shops tells us that Attercliffe folk were not rich but they were prudent, and many of them had cash and believed that “best is cheapest”.

Burton’s brand is now found only online, but around a couple of hundred of Harry Wilson’s buildings survive, though in England and Wales only half a dozen are listed, largely because English Heritage takes a dim view of good buildings stripped of their interiors.

Let’s hope the new owner of 783-787 Attercliffe Road treats the building kindly, because it commemorates the time when an ordinary working man could first afford a “Sunday-best” outfit as an alternative to his workaday clothes.

Ralph Dutton of Hinton Ampner

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Hinton Ampner, Hampshire: entrance hall

Ralph Dutton – his first name always pronounced ‘Rafe’ – was born in 1898, in the right place at the right time.

His parents were wealthy – his father a descendant of the 2nd Baron Shelborne with an estate at Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, his mother a daughter of a Bristol banker.

Ralph progressed from West Downs School to Eton, leaving in 1917 without taking his School Certificate. He was rejected for military service because of his eyesight and instead served as a clerk in the Foreign Office. In 1919 he was admitted to Oxford University on the strength of a letter from his mother to the Dean of Christ Church, and left two years later without taking a degree. During his second year at Oxford his father asked him how he was getting on at Cambridge.

This path through education gave him a priceless legacy of friends, young men who became luminaries in British life and culture – Anthony Eden, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Christopher Hussey, Beverley Nichols, Sacheverell Sitwell.

To the end of his life he gave no hint to anyone of his political views, his religious persuasion or his sexuality.

He knew that sooner or later he would inherit Hinton Ampner and, apart from taking a course at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, he spent his time and money on broadening his mind, travelling, and becoming adept at collecting fine art and furniture.

He acquired such treasures as a fireplace from Hamilton House near Motherwell, paintings by Jacob de Wit, Francesco Fontebasso and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and ceiling roundels by Angelica Kaufman.

He loathed his father’s house, a Victorian remodelling of a late-eighteenth century hunting lodge, and when eventually it became his in 1935 he lost no time in remodelling it in neo-Georgian style. His architects were his friend Lord Gerald Wellesley (from 1943 7th Duke of Wellington) and Trenwith Wells.

At the same time he began to write about the aesthetic interests that gave him joy, beginning with The English Country House (1935) and The English Garden (1937), and after the War resumed producing books about architecture and fine art until the early 1960s.

He filled the house with the paintings, furniture and books that he’d accumulated, and when he took up residence in August 1939 he entertained only one guest, his friend Charlotte Bonham-Carter, before the property was requisitioned to accommodate the girls of Portsmouth High School at the start of World War II.

When peace returned Ralph gradually brought the house and garden to a state that satisfied him, so that he could entertain his wide circle of friends in comfort and luxury – the biographer James Pope-Hennessy, the art critic Raymond Mortimer, the diplomat and politician Harold Nicolson and the novelist L P Hartley.

A serious fire in 1960 destroyed part of the house and disfigured the rest. Ralph Dutton’s immediate reaction was to call back Trenwith Wells (because Lord Wellesley was by this time fully occupied being Duke of Wellington) and his favourite decorator Ronald Fleming, and they not only restored the house but improved it, making good deficiencies that had only been recognised when it was lived in after the war.

He inherited the title 8th Baron Shelborne in 1982, three years before his death. He had no direct heir, so the title died with him.

He had bequeathed the estate to the National Trust in the 1960s, soon after the house was rebuilt. This caused some embarrassment to the Trust, who did not habitually take on properties before the paint was dry. They were grateful for the gardens and grounds, but only agreed to open the house to the public after his death.

I’m glad they did, because it’s a beguiling place to visit. The volunteer room-stewards are notably welcoming, and Ralph Dutton’s rooms are exquisite.

It’s not an easy place to find, and really needs more signage in the surrounding area, but it’s worth putting aside a day to relax and savour some of the comforts its owner wanted guests to experience: Hinton Ampner | Hampshire | National Trust.

St Cecilia’s Apartments

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At long last, the attractive parish church of St Cecilia, Parson Cross, Sheffield is sure of a secure future after years of redundancy and the threat of demolition.

It was built at the same time as the surrounding council estate and consecrated in 1939, designed by a little-known architect called Kenneth Mackenzie.

The church community thrived into the post-war period, led by clergy provided by the Anglo-Catholic Kelham Fathers, but in later decades the congregation shrank until they were forced to abandon the building for the smaller church of St Bernard, Southey Green.

The problem of disposing of St Cecilia’s after the church was closed in 2011 dragged on for several years, which I chronicled in a series of blog-articles: St Cecilia’s – starting a new chapter | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

Sheffield City Council insisted that the only possible reuse would be residential, and eventually a developer came forward with a practical scheme, completed in 2024.

St Cecilia’s still looks like a church, even to the carved crosses on the gables, though it’s been converted into seventeen modern apartments shoehorned into the space within: 2 bedroom apartment for rent in Flat 9 102 Chaucer Close, Sheffield, S5 (rightmove.co.uk).

I wish that the UPVC glazing had been black or dark grey instead of stark white, and it’s a shame that Kenneth Mackenzie’s Gothic tracery had to go, but I’m pleased that this charming building survives within its circle of surrounding houses in an area of north Sheffield which has lost some of the few landmark buildings that were built in the 1930s, such as St Hilda’s Parish Church, Shiregreen and the Ritz Cinema, Parson Cross.

Local people who knew and loved St Cecilia’s Church will be bewildered if they set foot inside now. Necessarily, its spaciousness has been sacrificed by the insertion of a mezzanine floor and multiple internal partitions, and though the arches of the nave arcades provide decorative features in individual first-floor apartments, the need to preserve the external fenestration has required compromises in the height of the window apertures.

Demolishing St Cecilia’s didn’t bear thinking about, not only because it’s an attractive and substantial building, but the closeness of the adjacent houses meant that it would have had to be taken down expensively brick by brick, which would have been an extended nightmare for local residents.

As it is, the former church can earn its keep and repay the investment in redevelopment. And the exterior looks immaculate.

It remains a quiet, unobtrusive presence in the midst of the Parson Cross estate, and it’s a witness to the energy of the Kelham Fathers and the optimism of the worshippers who arrived from dismal inner-city areas at the end of the Thirties, only to face the upheaval of war and the uncertainties of the decades that followed.

Brightside & Carbrook

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In the late nineteenth century Sheffield, like most places, was dotted with Co-op shops selling food and all kinds of household goods.

Many co-op branches were mundane buildings which, if they survive, are difficult to recognise, but on occasions a society would make an architectural statement in the grimy streets.

The Brightside and Carbrook branch at 18/20/22 Page Hall Road, on the former tram route to Firth Park via Attercliffe, remains a particularly spectacular landmark, faced with white faience and an elaborate composition of pilasters, aedicules and festoons.

Its opulent interiors were photographed at the time of its opening in 1914, when smart assistants and the manager, Alf Sparkes, waited expectantly for the first customers.

It served a moderately affluent community with clothing, drapery and haberdashery. An early image shows that the fascia advertised “clothing & outfitting…boots & shoes…linoleum & carpets…drapery, millinery and costumes”.

A much later image of the frontage dated 1952, showing that the white faience had become distinctly grubby in Sheffield’s polluted atmosphere, advertises “baby linen, ribbons, laces, a millinery showroom, ladies’ & childrens’ underwear, furs, corsets, skirts [and] a mantle showroom”.

At the time it closed on June 12th 1965 the front windows advertised “Co-operative furnishing, footwear…outfitting [and] drapery”.

Since then the building has been used as Patnick’s Junk Shop (1972), Pope’s DIY superstore (1993), Khawaja & Sons Halal Supermarket and presently the Hamza Supermarket.

It was listed Grade II in 1995.

Across the road is a less regarded building, 25 Page Hall Road, which has an inscription ‘FIRTH PARK COLISEUM’ and the date 1906. This has prompted overenthusiastic cinema enthusiasts sometimes to speculate that it was a cinema, but in fact it was a rival to the Co-op opposite.

It was owned by the outfitter Mr Samuel Alonzo Peel, who also ran the Emporium and Peel’s Stores in the nearby suburb of Brightside.

He was provoked in May 1915 to issue the following legal notice in the Sheffield newspapers:

It has come to my knowledge that statements have been made to the effect that the above businesses are not in a good financial condition and that I have therefore been compelled to work as a Turner at one of the large firms in Sheffield. Such a statement is untrue. When I heard of the shortage of men (although I have been out of the trade twelve years) I returned to this trade purely from a patriotic motive. My businesses are financially sound and if I can ascertain who the originators of the above slander are I shall be prepared to take proceedings against them… [Searching Picture Sheffield].

May 1915 is the precise date of the Lusitania riots, which destroyed many German butchers’ businesses in Sheffield and other cities: Libraries Sheffield: From the Archives: Sheffield and the Lusitania riots of 1915 (shefflibraries.blogspot.com).

According to the information in Picture Sheffield, Mr Peel died in 1925. His Coliseum survives. When I first knew it and puzzled over the inscription in the 1970s it was a launderette. Since 2014 it has been SK Market – Mix Potraviny. Mix Potraviny is Slovak for “mixed food”.

Castle House

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Former Brightside & Carbrook Co-operative Store, Castle House, Sheffield: main staircase

The “Co-op” was the mainstay of many working-class families, particularly in the north of England, from the mid-nineteenth century until well after the Second World War. Not only did it provide groceries and greengroceries; it offered furniture, funerals, clothing, carpets, soap and shoes as well as banking and insurance. The Co-operative Group remains powerful, but it has lost its proud tradition of cradle-to-grave service to customers who regained the profits of their trading through the dividend, or “divi”.

For historical reasons which were perpetuated by political inertia, there were two co-operative societies in Sheffield, the Brightside & Carbrook and the Sheffield & Ecclesall – the former based in the gritty, working-class east end and the latter serving the more affluent areas to the west. Geography divided Sheffield’s population in shopping, just as it did in football. Both co-ops originated in the 1860s.

Everyone remembered their “stores number”, which they gave to the shop assistant for every purchase so that at the end of the year the “divi” reached their membership account.

The Brightside & Carbrook Co-operative Society chose to plant their flagship city-centre store at the south end of Lady’s Bridge on land purchased from the City Council in 1914.

Building operations stalled until 1927, and construction revealed vestiges of the medieval Sheffield Castle, which had been dismantled in the mid-seventeenth century after the end of the Civil War.

The City Stores, a splendid shopping emporium with a lengthy façade stretching from Waingate along Exchange Street, eventually opened in 1929.

The building lasted only eleven years, and was destroyed in the 1940 Blitz.

After the B&C Co-op gave up the site to the City Council for what became Castle Market it took instead a site at the corner of Castle Street and Angel Street, and initially made do with a single-storey shop opened in 1949.

When building restrictions were eventually relaxed at the end of the 1950s the Society expanded upwards, building the impressive Castle House, designed by George S Hay, the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s chief architect, in collaboration with the CWS interior designer, Stanley Layland. It cost slightly under a million pounds.

Castle House began trading in 1962 and opened formally in 1964, joining replacements for other bombed-out Sheffield department stores – Walsh’s (1953; reconfigured early 1960s), Roberts Brothers (1954), Cockaynes (1955-56), Atkinsons (1960) and Pauldens (1965), along with one of the only two Sheffield stores that wasn’t bombed, Cole Brothers, which relocated to Barker’s Pool in 1965.

Of these, the Brightside & Carbrook store expressed a different architectural language to any other building in the city. The façade, splayed across the street corner, presents a blind wall of Blue Pearl Cornish granite that masked the sales floors on the first and second storeys.

Within, an elegant spiral main staircase connected the ground floor to each floor, and at the top a mural relief of a cockerel and a fish heralded the restaurant, with an innovative suspended ceiling, and the directors’ lavish board room and executives’ offices.

Castle House stood out from the other postwar city-centre department stores by the quality of its design in the style then known as ‘contemporary’. It spoke of the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s that life really was better than before the War and that there was no going back to the drudgery and hardship of the interwar period.

Shopping footfall in the city centre inexorably declined from the opening of the Meadowhall Centre in 1990. The main retail operation at Castle House closed in 2008, followed by the remaining peripheral departments, travel, the Post Office (2011) and latterly the supermarket (2022). It was listed Grade II in 2009.

Castle House and the adjacent former Horne’s building were repurposed in 2018 by the developer Kollider, though this enterprise hasn’t had a smooth passage: Is Kommune on the verge of kollapse? – by Victoria Munro (sheffieldtribune.co.uk).

The building is apparently intact but clearly underused. It still looks excitingly modern, though it’ll soon be sixty years old. Like all buildings, it needs to earn its keep in a continuing hostile economic environment, yet deserves considerable amounts of TLC.

Indeed, when the Heart of the City development is complete, it’s to be hoped that the desert of decaying buildings and empty spaces between Castle Square and the Victoria Quays, with the Old Town Hall in its centre, will be similarly transformed.

The longer it’s left, the more difficult it’ll be to rejuvenate.

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