Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Nottingham’s Water Palaces 1: Bestwood Pumping Station

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Former Bestwood Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

Former Bestwood Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

There used to be few more splendid places to dine in Nottinghamshire than the Lakeside Restaurant, a spectacular conversion of one of Nottingham’s fine Victorian water-supply pumping stations.  (Currently it operates exclusively as a wedding venue:  lakeside-brochure-web.pdf.)

Nottingham was the birthplace of one of the greatest British civil engineers of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hawksley (1807-1893), who specialised in water-supply engineering and served as consulting engineer to the Nottingham Waterworks Company.  He was the first to prove it was feasible to provide twenty-four-hour supply, a convenience that made water-closets fully practical.

He was responsible for managing the huge increase in demand as the population of Nottingham grew in the nineteenth century by tapping the abundant supplies of water held in the Bunter Sandstone that lies beneath the town.

The Bestwood Pumping Station, built in 1869-73, was part of that great project.  The brick engine house was built in thirteenth-century French Gothic style with stone facings.

Its architectural splendour was a gesture towards the 10th Duke of St Albans, from whom the six-acre site was leased.  He had rebuilt his nearby residence, Bestwood Lodge, in 1865, so the pumping-station chimney is contained in a 172-feet-high Venetian Gothic staircase tower which leads to a viewing loggia.

The engines were constructed by Joseph Whitham of Leeds, with a capacity of three million gallons per day, drawn from a well 176 feet deep.  They were replaced by electric pumps in 1964 and dismantled in 1968.

Following a steeplejack’s report that the tower was unsafe because of mining subsidence, plans were announced in 1972 to demolish the historic buildings.

Faced with a public outcry, the chairman of Nottingham Corporation Water Committee, Councillor Len Squires (Labour), complained, “Nobody realised the building had any architectural merit whatsoever until we decided to pull it down.”

When the Nottingham Corporation Waterworks Department was taken over by Severn Trent, Bestwood Pumping Station became derelict, listed but apparently unusable.

In fact, its architectural merit made it a superb location for an upmarket restaurant and wedding venue, with a fitness suite in the former boiler house.

The building reopened as the Lakeside Restaurant in 1997 with a décor strongly reminiscent of Victorian country houses, later replaced by an understated colour scheme of sage green and gold.

The latest refurbishment has transformed the interior to a dramatic black and white scheme with tiny touches of gold that admirably brings out the decorative detail of the Victorian structural ironwork.

The beam floor provides a further function room, the Tower Suite, and the tower will eventually be open once building work is complete.

It’s an indication of the pride that Victorian municipalities took in their utilities that this practical waterworks should so successfully become an elegant place for fine dining.

The former Bestwood Pumping Station features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Temples of Sanitation’. For further details please click here.

Exploring Saigon: Central Post Office

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Central Post Office, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Central Post Office, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Across Plaza Cong Xa Paris from the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Saigon stands the colonial-period Central Post Office [Bưu điện thành phố Hồ Chí Minh] of 1886-1891.

The classical exterior façade names an array of Western inventors – among them Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Alessandro Volta and André-Marie Ampère.

It was designed, for all the world like an iron-roofed railway station, by Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) in the same period that he was working on his eponymous Tour d’Eiffel in Paris.

Two evocative reminders of the French colonial era remain within – maps entitled  ‘Lignes telegraphiques du Sud Vietnam et Cambodge 1892′ and ‘Saigon et ses environs 1892′, respectively the telegraph network of South Vietnam and Cambodia and a map of greater Saigon.

An elegant row of seven wooden telephone booths, surmounted by clocks giving international times, lines one wall of the central hall.

This huge and busy Victorian relic offers all the expected post-office services, and some a visitor might not expect, such as pots of glue to deal with Vietnam’s non-adhesive postage stamps:  http://www.loupiote.com/photos/3140179341.shtml.

On my brief visit I missed the late Dương Văn Ngộ (1930-2023), the old gentleman in the post office who, until two years before his death, penned beautiful calligraphy for people who wanted to send important letters, such as business deals and proposals of marriage:  http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/the-man-who-writes-love-letters-a-day-with-saigon-s-last-public-letter-writer-a-470114.html.

Exploring Saigon: Notre-Dame Basilica

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Basilica of Notre-Dame, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Basilica of Notre-Dame, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Of all the interesting places I visited in Vietnam with Great Rail Journeys’ ‘Vietnam, Cambodia & the Mekong Delta’ tour, I’m most likely to return to Saigon, perhaps as a stopover en route to Australia or New Zealand.

Our local guide was at pains to point out that the official name Hồ Chí Minh City is a formality which can lead to embarrassment, when disparaging the city insults the political leader, and so Saigon [Sài Gòn] is the customary name to use.

Across Vietnam I repeatedly spotted unmistakably Gothic churches which must reflect the French colonisation, but the only one I had the opportunity to visit, very briefly, was the Basilica of Notre-Dame in the centre of Saigon.

Wikipeda meticulously renders its Vietnamese names Vương cung thánh đường Đức Bà Sài Gòn or Nhà thờ Đức Bà Sài Gòn as well as the Vietnamese rendition of its alternative title, the Basilica of Our Lady of The Immaculate Conception –Vương cung thánh đường Chính tòa Đức Mẹ Vô nhiễm Nguyên tội.

Constructed entirely of French materials in a weird combination of Byzantine and Gothic styles from 1877 to 1880, the basilica’s Marseilles bricks and twin spires suggest a jazzed-up version of A W N Pugin’s Cathedral of St Chad, Birmingham.

The towers were in fact additional, built to contain six bronze bells each in 1895. To the tips of the crosses, each tower is 60.5 metres high. At the time of construction these were the tallest structures in Saigon.

Though Christianity is a minority religion in Vietnam, Notre Dame is heavily used. It has survived so many wars and upheavals, and remains a focal point in the city.

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

The Manx St Pancras

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Railway Station, Douglas, Isle of Man: entrance

Railway Station, Douglas, Isle of Man: entrance

Railway Station, Douglas, Isle of Man: booking hall

Railway Station, Douglas, Isle of Man: booking hall

 Photos:  Matthew Binns

The Isle of Man Railway terminus station at Douglas is not what it once was.

Until it was drastically rationalised in 1979-80, the Manx capital’s station had the air of an important terminus, with two island platforms covered by iron canopies. The ironwork was removed, and one platform, the goods yard and a carriage shed were cleared to make way for a bus depot.

The grand headquarters building, built in Ruabon brick in 1887, survives as one of the finer Victorian buildings in Douglas.

Its Manx architect James Cowle also designed in Douglas the Tynwald Legislative Building (1894), the Victoria Road Prison (1891, demolished 2013), and elsewhere on the island the Onchan Methodist Church (1868), the spectacular Gothic house Crogga at Santon (1878), St Thomas’ Chapel at King William’s College (1878), St Catherine’s Church, Port Erin (1880) and the Ward Library, Peel (1907).

A proposal to redevelop the station, ostensibly “to make the building commercially viable to ensure its future preservation”, has produced a chorus of protest from Manx people [http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/business/it-s-all-change-for-victorian-station-1-6781032#comments-area], but it hasn’t yet caught the attention of people in the UK who admire Victorian buildings and love the Isle of Man.

The proposal talks of removing floors, ceilings and partitions, and inserting a mezzanine to accommodate an enlarged restaurant and a retail outlet, and to provide a glazed ‘al fresco dining area’.

The 1984 entry in the Manx Protected Buildings Register offers almost no protection to this building, which “is not felt to be a good example of such a Victorian structure”.

Actually, in terms of its magnificence and its significance in transport history, this is the St Pancras of the Isle of Man.

(I call to mind, whenever I visit the real St Pancras, that at one point in the 1960s that magnificent station was within ten days of demolition. After the train-shed and the hotel were listed Grade I in 1967, over thirty years elapsed before anyone found a way of making St Pancras pay its way.)

The Manx listing of the Douglas station pompously remarks, “…there does seem to be a considerable feeling of emotion on the part of the general public directed toward retaining the station intact regardless, and as public servants the authorities must take such views into account.”

Emotion, however genuine, needn’t enter the debate. All this project needs is intelligence, imagination, sensitivity and financial acumen.

There are lots of practical examples in the UK, and a few in the Isle of Man, to prove that the best way to ensure historic buildings contribute to present and future prosperity is by treasuring and nurturing their integrity, by maintaining their intact surviving features, rather than by creating a tacky pastiche to satisfy a developer’s bottom line.

The principle applies to all sorts of buildings – a monastery [https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=1451], a pumping station [https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=3442], a theatre [https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=3003], a flour mill [https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=2918] or a factory [https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=2585].

I hope that before Douglas railway station is trashed, Manx politicians – and Manx property developers – will recognise that the smart money lies in conserving the historic environment, not laying it waste.

Update:  In response to rising public concern, the Infrastracture Minister, Phil Gawne MHK, has backtracked on plans to gut or demolish the building:  “If [enthusiast groups] can demonstrate the historical integrity is being undermined by this plan then I am happy to look at this again.” [http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/taxpayers-cash-for-railway-to-be-cut-1-6830523]

Further update:  Phil Gawne MHK in a recent interview reiterates his willingness to engage in dialogue with railway heritage organisations:  http://www.manx.net/tv/mt-tv/watch/66948/douglas-railway-station?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=twitterfeed.  The footage provides, for the first time as far as I can tell, images of the proposed alterations and of the current condition of the station forebuilding and the separate clock tower.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Castle for climbing

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Former Green Lanes Pumping Station, now the Castle Climbing Centre, Stoke Newington, London

Former Green Lanes Pumping Station, now the Castle Climbing Centre, Stoke Newington, London

The flat plain of Stoke Newington is the last place anyone would expect to find a castle.

The strange-looking folly at the junction of Green Lanes and Manor Road was built as a water-supply pumping station in 1852-6 by William Chadwell Mylne (1781-1863), the Surveyor of the New River Company from 1810 to 1861, at a cost of £81,500.

The elaborate architectural treatment by Robert William Billings (1813-1874) is said to have been a response to the complaints of local residents in what was then an entirely rural area.

Though the cluster of turrets and buttresses is picturesque, every feature has a function:  the taller of the two towers, 150 feet high, was the boiler-house chimney;  the other tower contained the water-tank and the smaller turret provided staircase access to the roof.  The buttresses housed the three flywheels of the two engines, Lion and Lioness.

The steam engines were replaced by 1936 by a combination of diesel engines and electric pumps, which operated until 1971.

Demolition proposals led to a local outcry, and the building was listed Grade II* but remained unused until 1994 when planning permission was given to turn it into the Castle Climbing Centre [http://www.castle-climbing.co.uk/the-castle-history], which opened the following year.

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

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Sir John Brown’s church

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All Saints' Church, Ellesmere Road, Sheffield (1976)

All Saints’ Church, Ellesmere Road, Sheffield (1976)

My local community magazine, the Burngreave Messenger (Issue 112, June 2014), recently included an article by Elizabeth and Gordon Shaw about the Cornerstone, a stone-built community centre on the corner of Carwood Road and Grimesthorpe Road on the hill above Sheffield’s industrial east end.

The article proudly commemorates the continuous 127-year history of what was originally the meeting hall (1887) for the now vanished All Saints’ Church, Ellesmere Road, founded in 1869 by the steel magnate John Brown (1816-1896, Sir John Brown from 1867).

It’s good that this modest building is still used and valued, but it’s a pity Sir John’s great church was demolished in 1978:  http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3824154.

Like his neighbour and rival, Mark Firth, John Brown rose from humble origins in the Sheffield cutlery trade:  his successive breakthroughs were inventing the conical spring railway-buffer, which he eventually included in his coat of arms, manufacturing railway rails from Bessemer steel and rolling armour plate to clad ships of the Royal Navy.

On the hill above his works Sir John erected a magnificent Gothic church designed by Flockton & Abbott with a spire that could be seen from miles around.  When the original budget of £5,000 proved inadequate he flatly refused to accept a contribution from the Church Extension Society:  the final cost was £12,000.

This huge, cruciform parish church would have served as a small cathedral.  It inevitably became unsupportable as the surrounding housing was cleared.

It and the neighbouring Petre Street Methodist Chapel were replaced by a diminutive Local Ecumenical Partnership building, St Peter’s Ellesmere, which has a token spire.

When All Saints’ came down the eight bells were rescued and passed on to the 1911 Austen & Paley church of St Anne, Worksop.  The war-memorials were transferred to St George’s, Portobello, which itself closed in 1981 and is now used by Sheffield University for lectures and student accommodation.

All Saints’ is the biggest single architectural loss, as a historic building and as a landmark, in the Lower Don Valley, the site of Sheffield’s heavy steel industry, a place with little beauty and a tremendous story to tell.

The demolition of All Saints’ Church, Ellesmere Road is illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

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

More ghosts than guests

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Savernake Forest Hotel, Wiltshire

Savernake Forest Hotel, Wiltshire

Adjacent to the site of the Savernake Low Level Station in Wiltshire stands the Forest Hotel, built by the 2nd Marquess of Ailesbury c1864 soon after the opening of the Berks & Hants railway.  Its commercial purpose is not entirely clear:  on the night of the 1881 census it had one guest.  The 4th Marquess, on his rare visits to his Savernake property, preferred to stay at the hotel rather than open up Tottenham House.

For a period from the 1890s to around 1920 the hotelier also ran the refreshment room at the adjacent station.  From sometime before 1895 the hotel was owned by Richard Henry Bain, who reputedly bought it unseen in a conversation on a railway station:  he ran it for 45 years, until the Second World War, and died in 1946 at the age of 91;  his daughter, Mrs Lott, took it over and kept it for a further 23 years.   The hotel survived the demise of the railway station and closed in 1999:  it was subsequently converted to private residences.

A lively essay by Colin Younger gives more detail of the eccentricities of the landlords of this remote hostelry, and suggests that some of the guests may have proved difficult to get rid of:  http://www.burbage-wiltshire.co.uk/historic/hotel.htm.

The former Savernake Forest Hotel is now in private residential use.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Semi-detached theatre

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Theatre Royal, Nottingham

Theatre Royal, Nottingham

The classical portico of Nottingham’s Theatre Royal has dominated the streetscape since it was built in 1865:  http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/514-theatre-royal-nottingham.

Originally designed by the prolific and prestigious Victorian theatre-architect Charles John Phipps (1835-1897), it was modernised in 1896-7 by the more famous Frank Matcham (1854-1920), who at the same time built the new Empire Palace Theatre for what shortly after became Moss Empires partly on what had been the site of the Theatre Royal dressing-rooms.

There are stories of artistes straying into the wrong backstage-area, particularly after Moss Empires took over the Theatre Royal in 1924.

The Empire was also the site of Ken Dodd’s stage debut, as Professor Yaffle Chucklebutty, “Operatic Tenor and Sausage Knotter”, in 1954.

The Empire closed in 1958 and was demolished eleven years later for road-widening.  At a time when Nottingham City Council were planning and building the ultra-modern Playhouse as a repertory theatre, there was talk of demolishing the Theatre Royal also and building a replacement touring house elsewhere.

In fact, the Theatre Royal lingered on, becoming so decrepit that eventually the D’Oyly Carte company refused to appear because of the state of the backstage areas.

In 1977 the City Council purchased the County Hotel, on the opposite side of the Theatre Royal building to the former Empire, and commissioned Renton Howard Wood Levin to restore Matcham’s design, except for the proscenium arch and adjacent boxes, within Phipps’ auditorium envelope.

Subsequently, in 1980, Renton Howard Wood Levin built from scratch the magnificent Royal Concert Hall behind the Theatre Royal.  The two auditoria work in tandem [http://www.trch.co.uk], with the Playhouse operating at the other side of the city centre:  http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/whats-on.

Nottingham has a proud claim to have been at the forefront of the late twentieth-century revival of live performances in provincial towns and cities.

Greentop Circus

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Former St Thomas' Church, Brightside, Sheffield, now Greentop Circus

Former St Thomas’ Church, Brightside, Sheffield, now Greentop Circus

Because of the discussions about the future of the redundant St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield, I’m looking at examples of successful conversions of redundant religious buildings which have preserved the architecture while enabling the building to earn its keep.

I’ve already written about the former St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, Seel Street, Liverpool (now a restaurant) and the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Attercliffe, Sheffield (now a mosque) and the spectacular revival of the Monastery of St Francis, Gorton.

One of the best examples I’ve come across is the former St Thomas’ Church, Brightside, Sheffield, a modest Victorian parish church of 1854 by the local architects Flockton & Son, built to serve the first growth of artisan housing as the steelworks crept across the Lower Don Valley after the arrival of the railway in 1838.

It’s a more modest building than Flockton & Son’s contemporaneous work in Sheffield – the General Cemetery Church and Christ Church, Pitsmoor (both 1850), and St Matthew’s, Carver Street (1855) – but it is, as the cliché goes, small and perfectly formed, with a nave and chancel, a south aisle but no north aisle, a bell-tower and spire.

It was listed Grade II in 1973 and made redundant in 1979.  At first it was converted as a gymnasium for the Sheffield School of Gymnastics but then fell into neglect.

It was rescued by Anneka Rice’s TV programme, Challenge Anneka, broadcast on August 27th 1995 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9vZ1FI6Mwc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gGPhlmeY5s] as a circus school for Greentop Circus [http://www.greentop.org].

Apart from a shortage of storage-space, the interior is ideal for its present purpose.  The trapeze rig sits comfortably on the load-bearing walls of the nave;  there is ample height and floor-area and cramped but well-organised office-space in the west gallery, accessible by an intriguing spiral staircase in the tower.

Greentop is an arts education charity which provides, alongside training facilities for professional performers, school workshops and team-building for adults as part of its mission “to use contemporary circus skills to enhance people’s lives and inspire positive change”.

When I met a committee of the Church Commissioners to discuss the proposal to demolish St Cecilia’s, I was asked if there weren’t already enough community facilities on the Parson Cross estate.  I replied that if the existing six buildings were sufficient support for the local community, the area would not figure so high on indices of deprivation.

Greentop’s value to the local Firvale community is incalculable.  Some of the young people who have become involved are from the local Roma community, who have had a famously bad press recently:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10452130/Roma-in-Sheffield-When-it-goes-off-it-will-be-like-an-atom-bomb-here.html.

And without Greentop, the consecrated churchyard of St Thomas would contain only graves and a wreck or an empty space.

Sham Castles

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The Towers, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

The Towers, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Castle-by-the-Sea, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Castle-by-the-Sea, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Scarborough has three castles – the genuine article which dates back to Roman times, and two Victorian shams which have their own unique appeal.

The Scarborough brewer Thomas Jarvis built The Towers, designed by William Baldwin Stewart in 1866, immediately below the gatehouse of the medieval castle on the promontory that divides Scarborough’s two bays.

He later added the Castle-by-the-Sea, which overlooks the North Bay, at the other end of the little street that became Mulgrave Place, and in 1876 leased it to the Leeds artist, Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893).

Atkinson Grimshaw was the son of a Leeds policeman, an ex-railway-clerk who without formal training executed canvases of dusk and moonlight scenes, mainly of coast and harbour settings, with considerable commercial success.

One of his first and finest Scarborough works is ‘Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, the Burning of the Spa Saloon’ (1876), which was probably commissioned by Jarvis and was painted in great haste for the sake of topicality but not publicly exhibited.  It is now in the Scarborough Art Gallery [http://www.scarboroughartgallery.co.uk], along with ‘Scarborough Lights’ (c1877), ‘Burning off a Fishing Boat at Scarborough’ ) and ‘Lights in the Harbour, Scarborough’ (1879).

Atkinson Grimshaw reputedly influenced Bram Stoker into setting Dracula in Whitby.

He’s also regarded as a possible influence on Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the Whitby photographer.

He returned to Leeds in 1879 after getting into financial difficulties, and went on to paint numerous scenes in Hull, Liverpool, London and Glasgow Docks.

The Castle-by-the-Sea is a notably welcoming bed-and-breakfast hotel, one of the pleasantest places to stay in Scarborough:  http://www.thecastlebythesea.co.uk.

The Towers is a private residence and not open to the public.

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

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.