Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

Jam Jar Cinema – more than just a cinema

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Market Pavilion, Blyth, Northumberland

In the heyday of the cinema, children in the North West of England could trade clean jam jars at the box office for a part or the whole price of a ticket.  The practice was subsequently copied across Britain, and it’s remembered in the name of Tyneside’s pioneering community cinema, a charity based in a converted job centre in Whitley Bay. 

The Jam Jar Cinema was founded by Dan Ellis, then aged twenty-three, in 2013 to allow local people to see movies in a welcoming environment run by local staff and volunteers.  Dan and his founder colleagues, Stephen Fairly and William Smith, ensured that the standard of comfort was high from the outset:  most of the original seats were unused Odeon Premier seats, supplemented by sofas.

The opening night audience was nineteen people watching Gladiator.  This initial auditorium was supplemented by two more in 2019, along with a bar and lift.  The respective capacity of the three screens is 50, 29 and 38.

The whole place is welcoming – “We offer a cosy hug rather than a corporate handshake”.  Dan, who says he has the best job in the world, declares, “For me, it’s always been about creating as magical and premium an experience as possible – but also affordable,”

In 2019 Dan introduced a tiered pricing system, ‘Pay as you Please cinema’, because “We appreciate that people haven’t got as much money in their pockets as they once did.”  Customers are invited to choose a price that’s right for their situation by selecting either the standard Tier 2, currently £9.00/£9.50, or a lower Tier 1 (£7.50/£8.50), and anyone who feels able to pay more can use Tier 3 (£10.50).  No questions are asked or judgements made.

The Jam Jar Cinema received ‘Small Business of the Year’ and ‘Heart of Gold’ accolades in the 2020 Small Awards, and in 2023 Dan Ellis was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to cinema.

Northumberland County Council appointed Dan’s Jam Jar Cinema to operate the prestigious Market Pavilion in Blyth as “a vibrant and welcoming arts centre that will revitalise the community and encourage investment, developed with input from local residents”, designed by the Newcastle architects FaulknerBrowns.

The council’s aim is to draw local people to the neglected town centre by planting a social hub in the once-popular market place.  The Pavilion has three cinema screens, a 120-seat performance space called Studio 25, a bar and café.  It’s fully accessible and very comfortable, and is planned to attract 60,000 visitors to Blyth, generating £3.1 million visitor income and create 58 additional jobs.

This uncompromising and attractive building was opened in 2025 on the site of the former Central Cinema (built 1924;  closed 1961;  demolished 1974) with an extensive cultural festival of free events entitled Blyth Celebrates.  The Pavilion’s brick and glass structure is pleasant to look at and to look from, and it sits comfortably with the surrounding traditional buildings and the traditional markets held on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

This flagship initiative didn’t come cheap, of course.  It was funded by the UK Government’s Future High Street Fund and Northumberland County Council as part of the £90 million Energising Blyth regeneration programme that’s intended to “advance Northumberland’s economic prosperity, regenerate communities, improve liveability and create a more connected and aspirational County”.

This Newcastle University Business School case study indicates that the Jam Jar magic is working in Blyth:  Case Study: Market Pavilion, Blyth | Newcastle University.

I’m grateful to Charles Hooton for his itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026).

Enjoyable history

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Former Grand Cinema, Ryhope, now at Beamish Museum, Co Durham

The Grand Cinema, Ryhope, near Sunderland, is delightful, yet it’s the most ordinary small-town picture house you could imagine and it’s no longer in Ryhope.  Built in 1914 to seat just over nine hundred people, it’s basically an oblong brick box with a foyer, a balconied auditorium and a modest stage for live shows.  Its plaster decoration and stained glass made it cosy and attractive.  It was the only picture house in the pit town. 

Its subsequent history is conventional:  it was equipped for sound movies in 1930, converted to bingo in the 1960s and fitted out as a garage in 1997.  There are photographs of the decorative auditorium packed with cars before the building was emptied and dismantled from September 2020.

The Grand is typical of hundreds of small-scale cinemas, originally designed for silent movies with a musical accompaniment, which made it valuable to the Beamish Museum as a landmark in its 1950s town, where it has been transplanted and restored to show short local-history documentaries and period feature films as part of the Museum’s varied entertainment programme:  What’s on – Beamish Museum.  It opened on its new site on July 6th 2024.

Beamish Museum has built up an eclectic collection of structures and artefacts to illustrate “the development of industry and the way of life of the North of England” since it began in 1972.  The first director, Frank Atkinson (1924-2014), made it his mission to collect any and every historic item that people were willing to donate.  He was inundated.

To provide a convincing simulacrum of a past time, Frank Atkinson pursued a policy of acquiring complete buildings which were dismantled and translocated, and also replica structures that incorporate historic materials from a variety of locations.  The Grand Cinema is not a brick-by-brick reconstruction.  That was the initial intention, but the fabric turned out to be too fragile and dangerous to dismantle, so as many original features as possible were salvaged and incorporated in a new construction at the entrance to the 1950s town.

This approach has been criticised by some historians and museum professionals as inauthentic, but the purpose is to give future generations a vivid impression of how ordinary people lived from the early nineteenth century to the 1950s.  SPACE Architects of Newcastle “focused on creating a coherent townscape…rather than producing isolated replicas”:  Remaking Beamish 1950s Town | SPACE Architects.

Education should be enjoyable and accessible, and it’s now possible to sit in the stalls for a film show as well as eating fish and chips from a fake newspaper, riding on a heritage tram or bus or patting a pit pony.

Times have changed, however.  I noticed on my visit that when the national anthem was played at the end of the show, nobody stood up.  Nor did they race for the stairs as soon as they saw the final credits.

I’m grateful to Charles Hooton for his itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026).

Footfall for old cinemas

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Former Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, Northumberland

Former Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, Northumberland: proscenium viewed from front balcony

Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham

Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham: proscenium and light fountains from balcony

One of the admirable features of the J D Wetherspoon pub chain is that they’re kind to old buildings.  I’ve previously written blog-articles celebrating their Tunbridge Wells Opera House and Palladium Cinema, Llandudno.

Thanks to Charles Hootons’ itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026), I’ve visited and learned about the Grade II listed Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, designed by Charles Alfred Harding of the Newcastle practice Percy Lindsay Browne, Son & Harding and opened on November 16th 1937.

The style of the brick and concrete exterior is the toned-down version of Art Deco that is termed Moderne, but the interior is more exciting with Art Deco detail in the staircase of the impressive foyer and a fine auditorium with plaster coves by Webster Davidson & Co Ltd of Sunderland and concealed lighting by Devereux Moody & Co Ltd of Newcastle.  It originally seated 1,600.

The name “Wallaw” is derived from the name of its owner Walter Lawson whose Ashington-based cinema chain ran several picture houses in the area.

The Blyth Wallaw was tactfully subdivided in 1987 and refurbished in 1998, the year that it was listed, but it closed in 2004.

J D Wetherspoons took it on and celebrated its original intact architecture and decoration, and it opened as a pub on December 10th 2013 as The Wallaw.  An original projector and a sample row of seats are exhibited in the foyer.  It’s in good hands, thriving, and though it’s a pub you can clearly see it was a cinema.

Charles Hooton’s tour also took us to the Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, another magnificent Thirties cinema which is, after some vicissitudes, still a cinema.

The Globe was designed by the same architect as the Wallaw – Percy Lindsay Browne of Newcastle – and the interior plasterwork was by Webster Davidson & Co Ltd of Sunderland.  The third cinema on the site, it opened on April 20th 1935 as a variety theatre.  Its original seating capacity is variously recorded between 2,372 and 2,574.  

The proscenium is 49ft 2in wide:  the stage area is 39ft 2in deep and the grid sixty feet high.  The foyer leads into the circle level, so the stalls and stage are below street level and the backstage get-in is three metres above the floor and has to be accessed by a lift.

The building was acquired by Associated British Cinemas in 1937 and rebranded as ABC in 1967.  In the 1960s the Globe hosted big-ticket concerts featuring stars from Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry as well as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

It closed as a cinema in 1974 and, after a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert the following year, became a bingo hall.  Bingo ended in 1997, and the building remained dark for over twenty years.

It could so easily have gone, but Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council resolved to restore it, at an eventual cost of £27.9 million, of which the National Lottery fund contributed £4.5 million.

The restoration, designed by SPACE Architects (whose Remaking Beamish project embraced the 1950 town including the Grand Cinema) and undertaken by Willmott Dixon Interiors (who also refurbished the Granada Cinema, Walthamstow in 2025):  Globe Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees | Willmott Dixon.

The Globe reopened in 2021 and is now configured for a seated audience of 1,650, with capacity for 3,034 for standing events.  A former bridalwear shop next door has become a stylish box-office and bar/café.  The Globe is operated on a 25-year contract by the Ambassador Group.

It’s evident that even in a time of economic stagnation, local councils with vision – and enlightened operators like J D Wetherspoon and the Ambassador Group – can find funds to revive heritage cinema buildings that will pay their way by attracting people through their doors and enrich the local economy.

Coronet filling station

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Coronet filling station, Effingham Road, Attercliffe, Sheffield

There are enthusiasts for every imaginable aspect of history.  Some fields of interest are less penetrable than others:  if you want to know about most sports there’s no shortage of sources for arcane data, and the same is true of transport by air, land and sea.

I discovered recently that there are people who collect material on petrol filling stations:  Old Garages and Filling Stations – Sheffield History, Memories & Ex-Pats – Sheffield Forum.

A little-known and remarkable example that attracted my attention is the former Coronet Filling Station on Effingham Road, between the canal and the River Don in the Lower Don Valley, of which there is a superb photograph dating presumably from the early 1950s when the site first opened.

The only online image of this picture – Coronet Petrol Station – Sheffield History Chat – Sheffield History – Sheffield Memories – appears to be from Kathryn A Morrison & John Minnis, Carscapes – The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England (Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 2012).

Effingham Road acted (and still acts) as a relief road from Attercliffe to the city-centre, in the 1950s giving direct access to Victoria Station;  nowadays, as the B6071, it’s still useful to reach Sheffield Parkway en route to the M1 southbound. 

The location was ideal for a petrol station but, as one of the posts in the accompanying thread points out, the footprint of the site was crammed between the road and the Sheffield Canal. 

The need to spread the fourteen pumps and their associated tanks laterally, however, gave the architect a pretext for a spacious, eye-catching modern design.

Very few new buildings appeared in the East End in the fifteen years after the war and those that had survived the Blitz were grubby, blackened by atmospheric pollution, and dated.  The Coronet filling station was by comparison glamorous – and glamour was in short supply in 1950s Attercliffe.

A guest contributor to the Sheffield History Forum, ericsson, reported his family connection with the Coronet:

My dad, Eric Shaw ran this petrol station in the very early 1950s just before I started at Whitby Road Infant School. My dad was 90 years of age on Jan 24th 2015. I’m 65 now and was born Dec 21st 1949. The name changed to Effingham Road Filling Station when my dad had it. NB the wall behind is the canal wall! We then moved on to Staniforth Road Service Station, which is still a mainly vacant lot, but eventually moved on to Abbeydale Road Filling Station, now a Tesco station. That’s progress for you.

According to two contributors to the Sheffield Forum website, Simon Tow and coffeebean, the site changed hands in 1963 and the company that owned it was wound up in 1966.  [Coronet filling station – Sheffield History, Memories & Ex-Pats – Sheffield Forum]

Recently most of the clutter of a scrap business has been removed, making it easier to recognise the visual impact of the Coronet.

In fact, most of this structure remains and could be restored if anyone thought of a compatible, appropriate use for the site. 

Attractive though it was in its heyday, it’s almost inevitable that this brave piece of 1950s design will disappear. 

Non-Pots

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Former Attercliffe Non-Political Club, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2023)

Citu, the company responsible for the Waterside development which plans to transform Attercliffe after decades of decline, is respectful of the historic heritage of the area [FIRST LOOK: Attercliffe Waterside – Citu], yet some landmarks inevitably have to be sacrificed.

The Attercliffe Non-Political Club built a particularly distinctive landmark at the junction of Effingham Road and Attercliffe Road, an eye-catcher on the approach to town from the bottom of Staniforth Road, but it’s gone.

The working-class Attercliffe community supported a range of distinctive working-men’s clubs from its Victorian heyday to the end of the twentieth century and a while after.  A politically committed workman in Attercliffe, Carbrook or Darnall had a choice of joining the Radical, the Liberal or the Conservative WMCs:  the Conservatives, prompted by Disraeli, cast themselves as the friends of the working man in opposition to the business-oriented Liberals. 

I won’t speculate why Attercliffe never had a Labour Club, but it certainly supported a thriving Non-Political Club, the “Non-Pots”, for those whose honest priority was drinking cheap beer and having a good time.

The history of these eminent organisations is patchily recorded.  The Carbrook Conservative WMC has left records dating back to 1880.  The Attercliffe Liberal Club opened in 1882, and I’ve tracked the Radical Club back at least to 1888.  The Attercliffe Non-Political Club doesn’t appear in the street directories until 1913, but it may have operated earlier elsewhere.

The Attercliffe Liberal Club carried on until Covid and closed in 2020.  The non-partisan Darnall Victory Club, founded after the First World War, closed in 2022.

The Non-Pots building was at 450 Attercliffe Road from 1913 to 1920, and from 1921 it moved round the corner to 429 Effingham Road.  The damage that building sustained in the Blitz wasn’t fully reinstated until 1950.

There are no further planning applications involving the Attercliffe Non-Political Club in Sheffield Archives after 1959, so I’m at a loss to know when the distinctive grey brick corner building with its copper roof actually opened.  Graham C, a contributor to the Sheffield History forum, suggests that the concert room moved downstairs after 1966. 

After the Non-Pots club closed, the building became a gay club, “Rockies”, and then the “Dancing Dollar”.  Latterly it was a bathroom showroom until its demise in 2025.

The history forums are very useful for recording the Non-Pots’ place in late twentieth-century show-business history.

The club was an early supporter of Charlie Williams (1927-2006), the ex-Barnsley professional footballer who paved the way for black comedians to be accepted by British audiences.  Charlie continued to show up at the “Non-Pots” even when he was appearing in The Comedians at the London Palladium, and Graham C records that on nights when Charlie returned to Attercliffe members who couldn’t get served at the crowded club bar would bring beer in from the Sportsman Inn up the road.

A younger performer who served his show-business apprenticeship at the “Non-Pots” and other places was Paul O’Grady (1955-2023).  He told Paulette Edwards on BBC Radio Sheffield, “I used to love working there. I used to do two Sundays a month in Rockies.”  The fact that Lily Savage came to Attercliffe needs to be commemorated, otherwise the next generation might not believe it.

Whatever structure arises at the corner of Attercliffe Road and Effingham Road, I hope it carries blue plaques to honour two fine performers who were held in deep affection by the people who lived in Attercliffe before – and indeed after – the terraced houses were swept away.

Brisbane’s cathedrals

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St Stephen’s Old Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
St Stephen’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Brisbane, like all the major cities of Australia, generated two major Christian communities – Anglican and Roman Catholic – from its earliest days. 

It began as a convict settlement in 1824.  Settlers arrived in the 1830s, and the site was declared free in 1842.  Queensland was separated from the colony of New South Wales in 1859, with its capital only a few miles north of the border, by which time the Catholic Archdiocese and the Anglican Diocese, both of Brisbane, were established.

The Catholics quickly raised what is now Old St Stephen’s Chapel, a simple stone cell designed from afar by the great pioneer of the English Gothic Revival, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852), consecrated in 1850.  It was formally designated Brisbane Cathedral in 1863, the year that the foundation stone of its intended successor, also St Stephen’s, was laid. 

The British-born Benjamin Backhouse’s planned grand cathedral proceeded no further than its foundations, and Backhouse’s associate, Richard George Suter, designed a simpler nave which was consecrated in 1874.  Nothing more was built until after the First World War.

Meanwhile, the Anglicans had opened St John’s Pro-Cathedral in 1854, but hastened slowly to start their cathedral.

The British architect John Loughborough Pearson (1817-1897) began work on St John’s Cathedral, for a site bordered by George, Elizabeth and William Streets in 1885.  He had been commissioned to design Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, which was begun in 1880 and took thirty years to build.  Pearson’s plans for Brisbane were approved by 1889, but work had yet to start at the time of his death.

His son, Frank Loughborough Pearson (1864–1947) was appointed to revise his father’s plans, but the intended site was taken over by the state government and Frank Pearson had to further revise the design for the eventual site on Ann Street.  Phase 1, the east end and first bay of the nave, was completed in 1910, after which work stopped for over half a century.

Meanwhile the Catholic Archbishop James Duhig (1871-1965), characterised by his church-building projects as “Duhig the Builder”, proposed a grandiose Baroque Cathedral of the Holy Name, designed by the Sydney practice of Hennessy & Hennessy for a different site to St Stephen’s.  Their 1925 drawings depict a showy version of the London St Paul’s Cathedral, intended to be the largest sacred building in the British Commonwealth.

Construction started, to a toned-down design, in 1927 and eight years later Archbishop Duhig consecrated the main altar of the crypt.  After that nothing else was built.  The architect Jack Hennessy successfully sued the Archidiocese for unpaid fees in 1949-50, and the site was sold in 1985 to property developers who erected Cathedral Place in place of the cathedral.  A heritage-listed retaining wall is all that remains.

The Anglicans hardly had better luck for decades, even after Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein laid the foundation stone for Phase 2 of St John’s in 1947.  That project, for two further nave bays, was eventually built in 1965-69, and the final Phase 3, two more nave bays, a porch, the west front and three towers and two spires was completed in 1989-2009.

Later, at the very end of the twentieth century, the earliest surviving church building in Brisbane, Old St Stephen’s, was rededicated.  It contains a shrine to Australia’s first Catholic saint, St Mary McKillop (1842-1909).

Brisbane has two fine cathedrals, each the result of redesigns and changes of site, and – like the federal capital Canberra – a cathedral-that-never-was.

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform…

He treasures up His bright designs,
and works His sov’reign will.

[William Cowper, 1731-1800]

A Walk Round Attercliffe

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Britannia Inn, Worksop Road, Attercliffe Sheffield (2010)

I’ve led A Walk Round Attercliffe every year since 2017, only missing 2020 because of the pandemic lockdown.

These walks are part of the Heritage Open Days event programme and take place on a September weekday, usually Friday, including visits to St Charles Borromeo Roman Catholic Church, the former Sheffield & Hallamshire Bank (now a running shop) and the Zion Graveyard.

As a result, each year there’s a substantial waiting-list.  For health-and-safety reasons these walks are limited to 25 participants, and in 2025 I had a waiting list of fifty disappointed people.  I run only one Heritage Open Days Walk Round Attercliffe a year because I need to maintain goodwill with the sites that open up for us specially.

It’s become obvious that I should devise a version of the walk suitable for Sunday afternoons, and because the church and the running shop are unavailable, I include a visit to the Zion Graveyard and a comfort stop, with hot and cold drinks and cake available, at the Don Valley Hotel, formerly the Coach & Horses pub, opened in 1901.

The pilot Sunday-afternoon Walk Round Attercliffe was fully booked and took place on April 26th 2026.  There was yet another waiting list, so I’ve arranged a follow-up tour on Sunday June 7th 2026, starting at 2.00pm at the Attercliffe tram stop.  Wheelchair users are very welcome to join. There’s an accessible entrance to the Zion Graveyard.

I grew up in Attercliffe in the 1950s, and I understand why there’s such a level of interest in the memory of the grimy community that surrounded the steel works.  There are plenty of people still alive who were brought up in the terraced houses and went to the huge Victorian board schools, and the following generations who’ve heard the ancestral stories are curious to understand the profound changes that continue to take place.

The Lower Don Valley was the powerhouse of Sheffield’s heavy steel industry and Attercliffe was where its workers lived.  Though many buildings have disappeared what remains is a fascinating insight into the life of a once-thriving community, and there are countless stories located in the Valley, from the inventor Benjamin Huntsman to the comedian Charlie Williams.

If you’d like to join a Walk Round Attercliffe, please book at A Walk Round Attercliffe Tickets, Sunday, June 7  •  2 PM – 4:30 PM | Eventbrite.

The factory in a garden

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The Rest House, Bournville, Birmingham
The Rest House, Bournville, Birmingham

When George and Richard Cadbury took over their father John’s growing chocolate and cocoa business in 1861 their factory was located in the centre of Birmingham.  As the business grew they needed to expand, and in 1879 they relocated four miles to the south to a rural site which they named “Bournville”, tying the name of a local watercourse, The Bourn, with the French epithet ville.

The choice of site was practical:  it was farmland with easy access to the Worcester & Birmingham Canal and the Birmingham West Suburban Railway which was opened in phases between 1876 and 1885, that enabled bulk freight to reach the factory avoiding the traffic of central Birmingham.

This was no innovation.  Sir Titus Salt had already moved his alpaca mill from the centre of Bradford to a greenfield site he called “Saltaire” and constructed a village of high-quality workers’ housing between 1851 and 1871.

Yet the Cadburys had higher ideals:  Saltaire is attractive yet its rectilinear layout is distinctly urban;  Bournville was, from the outset, intended to be a garden village.  In 1893 George Cadbury bought an initial 120 acres of additional land adjoining the factory to start a development that ultimately reached 1,000 acres accommodating a population of 23,000 in 7,800 homes.

Bournville housing was from the start available to any prospective occupants, irrespective of whether they were Cadbury employees, and the houses were let on 999-year leases, rather than rented.  The leasehold policy enabled the Bournville Building Estate to retain control of the village environment with the purpose of “maintaining the rural appearance of the district”.  At the same time, the financial structure of the scheme was intended to make it practically self-supporting and independent of the fortunes of the Cadbury business.

The Estate Architect, twenty-year-old William Alexander Harvey, had supervision of all design and construction – indeed, he appears to have done most of the designing himself.  The master-specification for the dwellings stipulated a fixed bath and a spacious garden.  Each house had, by the terms of the lease, to cost at least £150, and 50% mortgages were available at 2½% interest over fifteen years.  Within three years some less scrupulous occupiers were selling their leases at profits of over 30%.  Subsequent housing was constructed over the following few years for rent, apparently to cater for workers who could not or would not take on the financial commitment required by the original scheme.

A further group of potential inhabitants were served by Richard Cadbury’s Bournville Almshouse Trust, which built in 1897 dwellings for pensioners, again not necessarily from the family firm, financed by the rentals of thirty-five adjacent houses let to ordinary tenants.  The architect for this attractive courtyard-development was Ewan Harper.

George Cadbury made over the whole of his Bournville Building Estate to a further charity, the Bournville Village Trust, in 1900, initially endowed with 313 dwellings on a total of 330 acres with the expressed intention “to ameliorate the conditions of the labouring classes, in Birmingham and elsewhere in Great Britain…by the provision of improved dwellings”. 

To the present day Bournville bears the stamp of its Quaker founder.  It has a strong community base which maintains George Cadbury’s teetotal principles:  in 2007 the local population saw off Tesco’s application for a drinks licence for its nearby convenience store. 

The extensive sporting facilities include playing fields at Rowheath, west of the village, and near to the chocolate factory the Bournville Baths designed by G H Lewin (1902-4), described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood, in The Buildings of England: Warwickshire (Penguin 1966), as “the most impressive architectural extravaganza on the whole estate”.

The centre of the village – now the visitor centre – is the Rest House (W Alexander Harvey 1913), commemorating George and Elizabeth Cadbury’s silver wedding and based on the Yarn Market at Dunster, Somerset.  Nearby stand two rescued fourteenth-century timber houses, Selly Manor House and Minworth Greaves Manor, from the city centre.

There are several educational facilities – Ruskin Hall, the village institute (W Alexander Harvey 1902-5, extended 1928, 1956 and 1966), the Junior School (Harvey 1905) and Infants’ School (Harvey 1910) and the Day Continuation Schools (John Ramsay Armstrong 1925) – and several places of worship – the Friends’ Meeting House (W Alexander Harvey 1905), the Anglican Church of St Francis of Assisi (W Alexander Harvey & H G Wicks 1924-5) and the Saint Prince Lazar Serbian Orthodox Church (Dragomir Tadić 1968).

And it has a Carillon, originally dating from 1906, enlarged in 1923 and completely reconstructed in 1934.

It’s an interesting place to visit. 

Walking round Kelham Island

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Green Lane Works gateway rear view, Kelham Island, Sheffield

There has been an island close to the centre of Sheffield since the twelfth century when the town’s corn mill was built.  The goyt carrying water to this mill left the River Don below the present-day Ball Street Bridge and ran parallel to the river until it reached Lady’s Bridge, the main river-crossing for traffic north into Yorkshire.  The land in between was known for centuries simply as “the Isle” or “the Island”, and there’s a reference to the Isle as late as 1795. 

The upstream area of the island may have acquired its name from the town armourer in the seventeenth century, Kellam Homer, who operated the Kelham Wheel by 1637.

Fairbanks’ maps of 1771 and 1795 clearly show that the surrounding area was still agricultural in the late-eighteenth century – the Duke of Norfolk’s nurseries were located at the present-day Nursery Street – but the River Don’s usefulness to industry quickly changed the townscape.  Water- and steam-powered works, along with workers’ housing, filled the area in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Not all these works were processing metal.  Another street-name, Cotton Mill Row, indicates a factory which was converted into a workhouse for six hundred inmates in 1829.  It was prone to overcrowding and repeatedly extended until it was replaced with the Firvale Workhouse (now part of the Northern General Hospital) in 1880.

The Sheffield Corporation Tramways Power Station was adjacent to the river and survives as the Kelham Island Museum, illustrating the industrial and social history of Sheffield.

Tucked away by the riverside, Kelham Island played a significant role in the city’s development, and its recent redevelopment as a desirable place to live, thrive and be entertained has drawn attention to its historic interest.

My colleague Anders Hanson gives walking tours of Kelham Island and the neighbouring area of Neepsend.  He’s a local resident and historian who knows its streets, buildings and gennels, with an engaging manner and a flair for a good story.

He links locations on his route with easily recognised personalities and aspects of Sheffield culture from the invention of Henderson’s Relish to the Arctic Monkeys and Lizzie the Elephant, as well as such upheavals as the Great Sheffield Flood (1864), the Blitz (1940) and a further flood in 2007.

Kelham Island has been dramatically redeveloped in the past twenty years.  It’s worth visiting.

Christ Church, Holloway, Derbyshire

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Christ Church, Holloway, Derbyshire

Christ Church, Holloway, halfway up a hill on the east side of the Derwent Valley near Matlock Bath, was designed by the Derby architect Percy Heylyn Currey (1864-1942) and consecrated in 1903.  It marks the tipping point between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century British architecture. 

Christ Church was sponsored by John Marsden-Smedley (1868-1959), owner of Lea Mills in the valley below Holloway, on land donated by the Nightingale family of Lea Hurst.  It was intended as the principal church in the newly established parish of Dethick, Lea and Holloway, and was completed in 1903 at a cost of £4,669.  The tower was added in 1911 in memory of William Walker of Holloway.

The design is solid and elegant in its proportion and detail, inside and out, less obviously displaying arts and crafts than the nearby Chapel of St John the Baptist, Matlock Bath, designed by Guy Dawber (1861-1938), but expressing the beauty of Arts & Craft architecture when the richness of High Victorian Gothic became softened by the desire for handcrafted, sensual designs advocated by, among others, John Ruskin (1819-1900) and William Morris (1834-1896).

Both buildings are listed Grade II*.  The Matlock Bath chapel is a gem, built on a steep slope in brick, irregular in form and embellished with exquisite fittings and furniture.  Christ Church, also on a hillside, is more solid, characterised by powerful masonry that embraces the simple spaces of nave, chancel and sanctuary.    Its decorative features stand out from a context of plain surfaces.  The reredos, font, pulpit, lectern and credence table, communion rail and pews are all designed by Percy Currey.  The organ by Andrews of Bradford was installed in 1903;  its action was modernised in 1988.

Christ Church is carefully lit by natural light from the south.  The only stained glass is the east window, a memorial to George Futvoye Marsden Smedley (1897-1916), killed in the Battle of the Somme.  It was designed by Louis Davis (1866-1941), “the last of the pre-Raphaelites”, who also did the east window of the Matlock Bath chapel. 

All the Holloway men who gave their lives in the Great War are prominently commemorated by seventeen rectangular gritstone tablets carrying incised inscriptions around the walls of the nave in gilded letters on a red background.  Photos of the seventeen individual tablets can be found at www.crichparish-ww1.co.uk/ww1webpages/christchurchplaques.html.

I visited the building with the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust and listened to a detailed account of the history of the parish and the building by the local historian Dennis Brook, who pointed out that the four successive proprietors called John Smedley inclined towards Nonconformity but were generous to Protestant congregations in the locality.  He also drew on detailed research in the John Smedley company archive to portray a vigorous community spirit that drove the church’s activities from the outset.

It’s worth seeking out Christ Church and St John the Baptist’s Chapel when they’re open.  They’re only a few miles apart, either side of Sir Richard Arkwright’s Cromford.  Christ Church is part of the United Benefice of Matlock, Dethick, Lea and Holloway.  St John the Baptist is cared for by the Friends of Friendless Churches.