Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

The factory in a garden

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 Saltaire 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, 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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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.

The Spiegelhalter Gap

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Former Wickham’s Department Store, Mile End Road, London

East Londoners will be familiar with the eccentric façade of the former Wickham’s department store on the Mile End Road.

I’d seen pictures of the building repeatedly in magazines and books about London, and I was so intrigued I went out of my way to seek it out when I was in London.

The story has been told many times.

The Wickham family ran a drapery business at 69-73 Mile End Road and in the early 1890s they persuaded their neighbour at 75, the Spiegelhalter family, to allow them to expand by moving to 81 Mile End Road.

The Spiegelhalters were German immigrants who arrived in the East End in 1828 and prospered as clockmakers and jewellers. Otto Spiegelhalter (1845-1902) and his wife Emilia raised fifteen children, of whom three sons carried on the business after his death. Their family presence on the Mile End Road had powerful emotional significance for their extended family.

A generation later, after the First World War when the Spiegelhalter family changed its name to Salter, the Wickhams, intending to build a store to rival Selfridges, had taken over the entire block except number 81, which the Salters insisted on keeping.

The Wickhams commissioned T Jay Evans & Son to design a grand classical building to fill the entire block without waiting for the Salters to agree to move out.

The result was that the Wickhams’ building was constructed around the little three-storey jewellery shop and so both facades remain to this day.

Wickhams had sold out to Great Universal Stores in 1951 and the Mile End Road business closed in the 1960s. The Salter family, still using the Spiegelhalter name for business purposes, closed their shop in 1981. It became an off-licence, and in due course became derelict.

Sinead Campbell provides more detail in this article – Wickham’s Department Store: The Harrods of the East End – and there is more history of the Spiegelhalter/Salter family at Shop | Spiegelhalter Family History | Yorkbeach.

The entire complex is now Dept W of Queen Mary University, for which the architects of the refurbishment, Buckley Gray Yeoman (BGY), were persuaded by popular demand to retain the Spiegelhalter façade, behind which nothing original remains: Council backs controversial plans for East End oddity.

There’s a curious anomaly about the stand-off that led to this landmark.

The colonnades on each side of the central tower of the Wickham store have seven bays with six columns, and the Spiegelhalter shop breaks the continuity at the junction with Wickhams’ entrance.

It’s clear that, once construction started, even if the Salters had relented and sold their property, the Wickhams had no way of incorporating no 81 without destroying the symmetry of their imposing façade.

Diplomacy, the art of handling affairs without arousing hostility, requires compromise. We see in present-day global affairs how obduracy makes it impossible to arrive at a solution that satisfies all parties.

69-89 Mile End Road stands as a mute, subtle reminder that resistance to taking account of others satisfies no-one.

As Winston Churchill repeatedly said (apparently borrowing the phrase from Arthur Balfour), “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”.

Save Derby Hippodrome?

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Hippodrome Theatre, Derby – seating newly reupholstered (1993)

Sometimes, when news breaks of a historic building been damaged or lost by corporate vandalism I think the UK’s legislative protection for heritage is unfit for purpose.

That’s not actually true. It could work if it was applied seriously: Demolition Of Listed Buildings: Is It Legal? – Christopher David Design – Architecture & Design Solutions In Surrey.

A restricted form of protection for ancient monuments has existed in England and Wales since 1882 but the widespread destruction of towns and cities in the Second World War triggered the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947 providing blanket protection to listed buildings.

There are potentially severe penalties for damaging, destroying or carrying out unauthorised works on a listed building: a Crown Court can impose an unlimited fine and/or two years in prison, and can issue a confiscation order to reclaim profits made from the offence.

The greatest threat to heritage buildings is, inevitably, money – the shortage of public money and the excess of corporate and private fortunes.

A league table of heritage-crime offences up to 2018 indicates that even the heaviest “unlimited” fines are pocket money to property developers and affluent private individuals: HISTORIC BUILDINGS PROSECUTION FINES.

Local authorities, starved of funds for over fifteen years, struggle to preserve education, adult social care and housing and much else. Preservation of old buildings comes a long way down their priorities.

Marie Clements’, the Victorian Society’s Communications and Media Manager, highlights the lack of staff to protect threatened buildings in one of the nation’s largest cities, Birmingham: News from the Victorian Society | Heritage skills crisis in local government.

One of the most instructive controversies over a building that remained intact until less than twenty years ago is the Derby Hippodrome, which earned its keep from opening as a theatre in 1914 until it closed as a bingo club in 2007, the year after it was listed Grade II.

It was acquired by Mr Christopher Anthony who after a small fire proceeded to repair the damage by taking an excavator to the roof: Bringing the house down | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times. Mr Anthony was eventually awarded a conditional discharge after admitting ordering work on the building without permission, and later went into administration.

The theatre has ever since stood open to the elements while well-meaning bodies made repeated attempts to set up a restoration programme, led by the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust (formed in 2010), joined later by the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust and the Theatres Trust, and overseen by Derby City Council.

These efforts were hampered by the difficulty of identifying the building’s current owners.

Companies House lists businesses trading with the name Christopher or Chris Anthony but no such individual of that name is listed: CHRISTOPHER ANTHONY PROPERTY SERVICES LIMITED people – Find and update company information – GOV.UK.

Blake Finance Ltd is repeatedly mentioned in the local press as being responsible for the Hippodrome, but the actual connection with the Derby Hippodrome is opaque: Hippodrome Theatre: Urgent works notice needs to be served on owner but who is that? | Derbyshire Live.

A succession of fires in May 2025 prompted Derby City Council to undertake a rapid, radical demolition of the remains of the proscenium and front stalls on safety grounds.

Historic England, the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust, Derby Civic Society and Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust challenged this action within forty-eight hours, and work stopped.

An urban explorer, MotionlessMike, has posted a collection of images from May 2023 to show how much of the building remained until the recent series of what many believe were arson attacks: Report – – Derby Hippodrome – The End (2025) | Theatres and Cinemas | 28DaysLater Urban Exploring Forums.

Contributors to the Save Derby Hippodrome Facebook stream [SAVE DERBY HIPPODROME | Facebook] include individuals who clearly understand the technicalities of demolition and neighbours who witnessed the successive demolitions that have overtaken the structure.

There’s a comprehensive survey and discussion of the Hippodrome scandal by John Forkin at And so, the Derby Hippodrome may soon be no more… – Marketing Derby.

And so the remnants of this Grade-II listed once fully restorable theatre remain, and its supporters are yet trying to find a way of saving them: Theatre at Risk Derby Hippodrome demolished.

Nottingham Playhouse

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When I visited Nottingham Playhouse recently to see my friend Andrea in a superlative production of Aaron Sorkin’s play based on Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird [To Kill A Mockingbird] I felt an immediate sense of nostalgia when I entered the auditorium.

When the Playhouse opened in 1963 I was in the middle of my grammar-school education and by the time we reached the sixth form the following year our English teachers had formed a rota to take us by coach once a month on a Friday evening to see whatever was on in the Playhouse’s opening seasons which were directed principally by John Neville (1925-2011).

Neville shared his role of artistic director at first with Frank Dunlop (b1927), who went on to found the Young Vic in 1969, and the polymathic Peter Ustinov (1921-2004). Between them they brought to Nottingham a broad range of classic drama and a scintillating troupe of talented actors.

Therefore, in our teens, we were privileged to see – live on stage – not only John Neville’s Richard II, Oedipus and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, but the twenty-something Judi Dench as Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s bawdy Restoration comedy The Country Wife, which had us rolling about in our front-row seats, even if some of us didn’t at first twig the pun in the title.

These opportunities were unrepeatable: Neville resigned in 1969 because the theatre’s grant was repeatedly frozen; nowadays theatre seat-prices are elevated beyond most school budgets, especially when big-name performers are cast. Indeed, Nottingham Playhouse runs a laudable 50:50 Appeal, which enables audiences to donate the cost of tickets for local people who otherwise wouldn’t experience live theatre: 50:50 Appeal – Nottingham Playhouse.

I’m pleased to see that Peter Moro’s theatre, with the circular drum of the auditorium prominent above the rectilinear outer shell, has been respectfully restored: Moro had been involved in the Royal Festival Hall project, and for Nottingham created a conventional proscenium theatre that encloses its audience so they share the same space as the actors.

And on the night I was there the To Kill a Mockingbird tour filled every seat in the house as it storms around the country on its way to a West End run in August 2026: TOUR — To Kill A Mockingbird.

The Abbeydale Picture House – Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema

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My latest book, The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema, is now on sale. It’s a long story, but a short book, telling the history of a much-loved building, the people who worked there and the thousands whose lives were brightened by it from 1920 onwards.

The Abbeydale Picture House has always been exceptional among local cinemas. Its architect, Pascal J Stienlet, designed the auditorium and stage as a theatre, so the balcony embraces the proscenium and the stage has a fly-tower and a suite of dressing rooms which I’ve come to suspect were never completed.

The building sits on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the River Sheaf, so the space under the stage was fitted out as a billiard saloon, and the ballroom beneath the auditorium had a sprung floor and a disconcerting sloping ceiling to match the rake of the seating above.

Its original proprietors struggled in the face of post-war inflation and quickly handed the place over to a more experienced team who were involved in two other cinemas south of the city centre.

It took until the 1930s for the shareholders to receive a modest dividend, but from then till the late 1950s the Abbeydale brought in crowds to watch films, dance and play billiards. The Abbeydale offered warmth, comfort and style. A whole generation of local people met their life-partner under its roof.

As times changed and suburban cinemas went out of favour, it was the third last suburban cinema in Sheffield to close, in 1975.

It was quickly adapted as an office-equipment showroom, but since then attempts to find it a practical purpose have repeatedly failed, until True North Brew Co acquired it at the beginning of 2025 and made firm plans to restore and refurbish it as a multipurpose entertainment centre – which was exactly its function in the 1920s: Abbeydale Ballroom | Sheffield’s new social space | pool hall.

I’ve been involved in the Abbeydale’s heritage since the 1980s, and had the good fortune to build my knowledge on Dr Clifford Shaw’s extensive research, and on oral-history interviews carried out by a Sheffield University postgraduate student, Holly Dann, both of whom talked to people who remembered the Abbeydale since before the Second World War.

It’s arguably the only surviving first-generation cinema in Sheffield that’s physically intact, architecturally interesting and has an abundance of stories about the people for whom it was and is a landmark in their lives.

Of the fifty-two cinemas that were operating within the then city boundary in the first month of the Second World War, the Abbeydale is the only one that has so many tales to tell and has the potential to bring enjoyment to future generations of Sheffield people.

A participant on a recent Heritage Open Days tour remarked, “I’ve passed this place hundreds of times and never realised how beautiful it is.”

The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema has 56 A5 pages in full colour.

To see sample pages, please click here.

To purchase, please click here, or send a cheque for £10.00 per copy payable to Mike Higginbottom at 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ. Contact: 0114-242-0951 or 07946-650672 or mike@mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk

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