Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

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.

Lady Lever’s art gallery

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Port Sunlight, Wirral: The Diamond and the Lady Lever Art Gallery

William Lever, the soap manufacturer and founder of Port Sunlight, was a highly successful businessman and a generous philanthropist, though some of his decisions were ill-advised.  For instance, he became enmeshed in the Belgian King Leopold II’s brutal private Congo Free State in order to secure palm-oil plantations to supply his works.

One decision he never regretted was his marriage to Elizabeth Hulme in 1874 when they were both 23.  She died in 1913, two years after her husband was made a baronet, and when he was ennobled as a baron in 1917 he took as his title Lord Leverhulme, incorporating her maiden name with his surname.  He was further elevated as Viscount Leverhulme in 1922.

Elizabeth Lever was a quiet, practical personality who gave her husband unstinting support throughout their climb to prosperity:  their son wrote that “her contribution was sympathy and understanding – an unquestioning belief in the rightness of all her husband undertook.  She never asked for any altered mode of life which might have distracted him from the work he had in hand…”  He added that “my parents used to say that they never remembered a world without each other in it”:  they had known in each other since childhood.

William Lever commemorated her by commissioning William & Segar Owen to design the Lady Lever Art Gallery (1914-22), a cleverly designed classical monumental building, filling the vista at the end of The Diamond in the centre of Port Sunlight.

It’s an imposing structure, low and solid enough to sit comfortably in the context of vernacular-style cottages and picturesque layout.  The 364-foot-long building is constructed of reinforced concrete faced with Portland stone, a choice apparently influenced by Lever’s admiration for the part-completed buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition that he visited in Chicago in 1892, and probably encouraged by his connection with Professor Charles Reilly at the Liverpool School of Architecture.

This long corridor of a building has a rotunda at each end, north and south, with a top-lit main hall flanked by a series of smaller rooms.  These include five “period” rooms, chosen by Lever to display furniture and other objets d’art:  three, ‘Tudor & Stuart’, ‘William & Mary’ and ‘Early Eighteenth Century’ are made up from historic material purchased from London dealers;  the ‘Adam’ room is pastiche, designed by Percy Mcquoid and constructed by the decorators White, Allom & Co;  the ‘Napoleon’ room was designed by Segar Owen.

William Lever frankly declared that “I am blind on music and poetry.  The whole of my artistic tastes are in colour, representing pictures, porcelain and furniture”.  He had built up a considerable collection, much of it consisting of the contents of others’ collections – three separate collections of water-colours and Chinese porcelain successively purchased from the surgeon-dentist James Orrock in 1904, 1910 and 1912, together with paintings from George McCullough in 1913, Wedgwood ware from the first Lord Tweedmouth (1820-94) and Greek and Roman antiquities originally belonging to the Regency collector Thomas Hope (1769-1831).

His choices for the Gallery reflect the taste of his time.  There are paintings by Frederic, Lord Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Sir John Everett Millais and William Etty alongside earlier artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, George Romney, John Constable and J M W Turner.  Lever’s purpose was not to reflect his own preferences, but “to cater for all tastes…for those who do not particularly admire pictures, statuary etc…”

The statuary complements the pictures, with a number of beautiful nudes which the supposedly prudish Victorians enjoyed – Lorenzo Bartolini’s Venus, Edward Onslow Ford’s Echo and Frederick William Pomeroy’s The Wood Nymph.

This is a serious collection, weighty and rich, yet even visitors with little knowledge of fine art may recognise such eyecatchers as Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat and Millais’ Bubbles, which Lever acquired with the rival soap manufacturer, Pear’s, that famously used the image in its advertising.

Ironically, the gallery also shows the Augustus John portrait, Lord Leverhulme, which its subject disliked so much he took a penknife to it:  the face was quietly kept hidden until it could be reunited with the rest of the canvas and restored in 1954 by Philip, 3rd Lord Leverhulme.

Port Sunlight

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Port Sunlight, Wirral: Fire Engine Station (2008)

The maxim “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was popularised by John Wesley in his sermon ‘On Dress’ in 1791, but it was hardly a practical possibility for ordinary people until the soap tax was abolished in 1853 and manufacturers produced inexpensive soaps for washing people, clothes and households.

One of these was William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925) who revolutionised the retailing of soap and made a vast fortune through ‘Sunlight’, the first brand to eliminate the use of silicate of soda and to reduce the proportion of tallow oil in favour of vegetable oil.

He and his brother James Darcy Lever (1854-1910) opened their Warrington factory in 1886 to produce their paper-wrapped, lemon-scented ‘Sunlight’ brand, initially with the ponderous slogan “Sunlight Self-Washer Soap:  See How This Becomes The House”

Stung by his bankers’ refusal to underwrite a new factory in Warrington, William Lever resolved to build on an unpromising marshy site at Bromborough Pool on the Wirral shore of the River Mersey advantageously located between the river and the railway.

Lever noticed that the enlightened Price’s Patent Candle Company had established a workers’ village at Bromborough Pool in 1853, and he aspired to provide his workers with the benefit of high-quality rented housing and open spaces like Edward Akroyd’s Copley (1849) and Akroyden (1859, Sir Titus Salt’s Saltaire (1859) and George & Richard Cadbury’s Bournville (1879).

The initial building-programme for what became Port Sunlight extended to approximately 56 acres, 24 of which were for the factory (completed 1889) and its associated transport links, and the other 32 were for the start of the workers’ village.  William Lever regarded his company housing as a means of “sharing prosperity”, though not sharing profits.

The Warrington architect, William Owen (1846-1910), was responsible for filling in a series of tidal inlets to create the site.  He designed many of the houses built from 1889 onwards and the public buildings which nurtured the village community.  Gladstone Hall (William Owen 1891) was initially a men’s dining room and Hulme Hall (William & Segar Owen 1900-1) was the corresponding women’s dining hall, commemorating Lady Lever’s maiden name.  The original scheme, which now forms the south-western portion of the existing village, was completed in 1897.

As a result of William Lever’s reflections during his round-the-world voyage in 1892, the site was extended to approximately 130 acres, bounded by the factory to the south, the railway to the west, the Bebington Road to the north and the New Chester Road to the east.  By 1900 over four hundred houses had been completed.  The Bridge Inn (Grayson & Ould 1900) – named after the now-buried Victoria Bridge across the filled-in creek – was built as a temperance hostelry but licensed (against William Lever’s principles, but with his consent) from 1903.

He outlined his vision for his factory village in an address to the International Housing Conference visit in 1907:

…building…ten to twelve houses to the acre is the maximum that ought to be allowed…Houses should be built a minimum of fifteen feet from the roadway…every house should have space available in the rear for [a] vegetable garden.  Open spaces for recreation should be laid out at frequent and convenient centres…A home requires a greensward and garden in front of it, just as much as a cup requires a saucer.

Lever was astute in employing a small number of regular architects – William Owen of Warrington, John Douglas of Chester and Douglas’ pupil Edward A L Ould – yet also enlisted other architects of local and national calibre for smaller commissions, including Sir Ernest George, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Professor Charles H Reilly.

Two standard housing templates were used – the Kitchen Cottage (consisting of kitchen, scullery, larder and three bedrooms) and the Parlour Cottage (an enlarged version of the Kitchen Cottage with a parlour and additional bedroom).  All had an outside WC and – unusually for the period – a bath, either covered in the scullery or in a separate ground-floor bathroom.

In 1910 an architectural competition was held to complete the layout:  it was won by Ernest Prestwich (1889-1977), then a third-year student at the Liverpool School of Architecture.  His formal scheme set out The Diamond, a wide boulevard running north-south, crossed by The Causeway, aligned on Christ Church, which had been completed in 1904.

By the time Lord Leverhulme died in 1925, 890 houses had been completed in Port Sunlight, most of them before 1911.  Some further construction took place between the wars, up to the building of Jubilee Crescent in 1938, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the factory.

The Royal Tuschinski Theatre

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Royal Tuschinski Theatre, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abraham Icek Tuschinski (1886-1942) was the founder and creator of one of the world’s finest cinemas, the Royal Tuschinski Theatre [Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski] in Amsterdam.

Tuschinski was born to Polish parents in 1886, and after he married in his late teens he decided to take his new wife, Mariem Ehrlich, to a new life away from the antisemitism of their native country.

He settled in Rotterdam and over a period of thirteen years established four cinemas in the city, each more elaborate than its predecessor.

At the end of the First World War he made a partnership with two brothers-in-law, Hermann Gerschtanowitz and Hermann Ehrlich, and bought land on Amsterdam’s Reguliersbreestraat near the Rembrandtplein square.

Construction began in June 1919 and the cinema opened on October 28th 1921.  The initial designer was Hijman Louis de Jong (1882-1944), who was dismissed before the building was completed:  the interiors were finished by Pieter den Besten (1894-1972) and Jaap Gidding (1887-1955)

Art historians variously describe the styles employed as Jugendstil (otherwise Art Nouveau) and Art Deco (though the term didn’t become current until after the 1925 exhibition Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes).  A useful umbrella term is the Amsterdam School.  A practical adjective would be “exotic”.

Tuschinski wanted his patrons, when they stepped into the foyer, to feel they’d entered an illusion.  The auditorium resembled an opera house, with two balconies above the stalls.  Private spaces included a cabaret named La Gaité, a Japanese tearoom and a Moorish suite.  A modern heating and ventilation system guaranteed comfort at all seasons, and after a refurbishment in 1936 the new carpet had two-inch pile.  The building boasted the first organ in a Dutch cinema:  Wurltizer couldn’t deliver in time, and Tuschinski grabbed a second-hand alternative from a cinema in Brussels.

There is a magnificent collection of archive photographs of the theatre’s early days together with modern images by Isabel Bronts at Cinema of Dreams: The Inspiring Story of Amsterdam’s Tuschinski Theate – Cabana Magazine.

The Tuschinski Theatre cost four million guilders and quickly became celebrated.  Abraham Tuschinski was awarded Dutch citizenship in 1926, but the splendour went sour as war approached. 

When the Nazi troops invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, four of Tuschinski’s cinemas in Rotterdam were destroyed.  On Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday in August that year, British and Dutch flags appeared at a window at the Tuschniski.  Abraham Tuschinksi declined an opportunity to escape to Britain, saying that he “grew up in this country in good times [and didn’t] want to be a deserter in bad times,” he said.

The three brothers-in-law were deprived of their business, and its Jewish name was changed to Tivoli by the Nazi-supported replacement owners, Tobis Film.  Its programmes went over entirely to German films and performances by German artistes.  A fire in the summer of 1941 destroyed some of the exquisite decoration. 

Abraham Tuschinski was arrested on July 1st 1942 and sent first to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz where he was murdered on September 17th 1942.  Only three members of the Tuschinski, Ehrlich and Gerschtanowitz families were still alive at the end of the war.

This was far from the end of the story, however.  Max Gerschtanowitz took the business on after the war, and the cinema subsequently passed through successive owners until the French Pathé company acquired it as part of the MGM combine in 1995.  

Pathé carried out painstaking restorations in 1998-2002 and again in 2019-20.  Technical details of these restorations and much historical background can be found at Abraham Icek Tuschinski – Jewish Amsterdam and Pathé Tuschinski Cinema in Amsterdam | Amsterdam.info.

In 2021 King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands granted the complex the accolade “Royal” [Koninklijk].  Two grandsons of Hermann Gerschtanowitz and his great-grandson, the actor and TV personality Winston Gerschtanowitz, and a grandson of Hermann Ehrlich attended the ceremony.