Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

The Biretta Belt

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All Saints' Church (formerly St Aidan's), Small Heath, Birmingham

All Saints’ Church (formerly St Aidan’s), Small Heath, Birmingham

The Anglican parishes around the Birmingham Small Arms factory in Small Heath were carved out of the ancient parish of Aston between 1846 and the end of the nineteenth century, and became part of the Anglo-Catholic “biretta belt” of South Birmingham.

One of the last of these was St Aidan’s Church, begun in 1893, designed in red brick with buff terracotta by Thomas Frederick Proud (d 1901), with a clergy house, intended for a team of single curates, by the Birmingham metalworker and architect Arthur Stansfield Dixon (1856-1929).

The eastern end of the church – chancel, guild chapel and two bays of the nave – was completed in 1894 and consecrated two years later;  the western end including the baptistery and bellcote was finished by the end of 1898.

Once the shell of the church was complete, Arts & Crafts designers supplied much of the decoration:  Bertram Lamplugh of the Birmingham School of Art designed the Good Shepherd window in the Guild Chapel in 1907, and Frederick Bligh Bond (1864-1945) and W E Ellery Anderson (1888-1942) collaborated with the incumbent, Canon Newell Long, to begin an ambitious decorative scheme, some of which remained unexecuted because of the intervention of the Great War.  The last decorative addition during Canon Long’s incumbency was the free-standing reredos for the Sanctuary by Ellery Anderson, executed by Mowbray & Sons of Oxford and dedicated in 1921.

The grandiose celebrations of Anglo-Catholic worship created continuing problems within the politics of the Birmingham diocese.  Bishop Ernest W Barnes (1874-1953;  bishop 1924-1953) took against the figures on the Rood Screen, the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament and the use of incense, and at one stage refused to take confirmations within the parish.

St Aidan’s was valued highly by the early aficionados of Victorian and Edwardian art and architecture, such as John Betjeman – “[a] successful Perpendicular design in red brick and terra cotta”, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner – “a striking and successful example of the local red brick and terracotta school…with an atmosphere much encouraged by the splendid Rood and Screens”.  The Victorian Society identified it as “one of the six or seven finest Victorian churches in Birmingham”.

Housing clearance and the collapse of the BSA company in 1973 encouraged the flight of the local population.  By 1991, only nine of St Aidan’s communicants lived within the parish boundary.  Meanwhile an influx of Asian families meant that by 1997 at least 65% of the population within the parish was Muslim, and most of the local schools had at least 90% Muslim pupils on roll.

From 1994 the diocese of Birmingham closed and disposed of surplus buildings in the parishes of St Gregory and St Oswald, and concentrated activity on the St Aidan’s site, while renaming the parish All Saints to commemorate the dedication of the original early Victorian parish.

The St Aidan’s building was radically reordered, reversing the direction of worship to use the apsidal baptistery as a sanctuary, enlarging the Lady Chapel to provide an intimate worship space and forging an entrance directly on to the street with a meeting-hall above where the High Altar had formerly stood.

The Victorian Society vigorously opposed this attack on the historical integrity of the building, and in 1998 forced the issue to a Consistory Court where the Chancellor found against them, accusing the Society of acting “arrogantly, unreasonably and without common sense”.

This fine church, the “Cathedral of the Back Streets”, continues to serve its purpose under the oversight of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet in an environment vastly different to that for which it was built.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

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

People of the Book

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Reform Synagogue, Bowland Street, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Reform Synagogue, Bowland Street, Bradford, West Yorkshire

The Bradford Jewish communities were never numerically large, perhaps a hundred families in the late-nineteenth century, but they were extremely influential.

The German and Danish Jews whose warehouses are now called “Little Germany” were not refugees, but came in search of prosperity in the early decades of the nineteenth century.  They assimilated, and then coalesced into the city’s Reform Congregation.

From their ranks came four Bradford mayors, including Charles Joseph Semon (1814-1877;  Mayor 1864-5) and Jacob Moser (1839-1922;  Mayor 1910-11), as well as the merchant Sir Jacob Behrens (1806-1889) and Professor Friederich Wilhelm Eurich (1867–1945) who led the search for a cure for cutaneous anthrax or “wool-sorter’s disease”.  The composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934) and the painter Sir William Rothenstein (1872-1945) both came from Bradford German-Jewish families.

This Reform Congregation built the magnificent Moorish Grade II*-listed Reform Synagogue on Bowland Street, designed by T H & F Healey in 1881, a rare and fine survival of the Islamic Revival style.

In the 1880s, fleeing the pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, came Russian Jews who disliked the practices of the Reform Synagogue and founded their own Orthodox Synagogue in Spring Gardens in 1906.

The Orthodox community were sufficiently confident of their future to close the Spring Gardens synagogue in 1970 and move to a modern building at Springhurst Road, Shipley.  The Spring Gardens building, with the inscription above its doorway, “How goodly are your tents, O Israel”, is now the Al Mumin independent Muslim primary school, and the Orthodox Congregation had to close their Shipley synagogue in April 2013 because they no longer had sufficient numbers to hold services.

Meanwhile, the Reform Congregation of around thirty-five people somehow manages to maintain their building and hold monthly services:  http://www.bradfordsynagogue.co.uk/index.htm.

Among the supporters who have helped this tiny community financially are the Bradford Council of Mosques and other members of the local Muslim community:  http://www.bradfordsynagogue.co.uk/index.htm.

The local MP, George Galloway, tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons which congratulated “the members of the Bradford Muslim community for their extraordinary ecumenical gesture in raising a very large sum of money to repair the roof of Bradford’s last remaining synagogue, thereby enabling members of the Jewish community to continue to worship there;  and believes that this generous gesture shows the true spirit of Islam towards other People of the Book.”

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

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs 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.

King Ludwig’s legacy

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Hohenschwangau (foreground) and Neuschwanstein (background), Bavaria, Germany

Hohenschwangau (foreground) and Neuschwanstein (background), Bavaria, Germany

Among the tourist highlights of Bavaria are the fascinating castles of Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein, the former built by King Maximilian II of Bavaria (1811-1864) and both vividly associated with his son, Ludwig II (1845-1886), who is an interesting, sad figure.

Hohenschwangau reminded me a great deal of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, whereas the vast, unfinished Neuschwanstein has the dark, dreamy Gothic quality of Pugin’s Alton Towers and Alton Castle, and Burges’ Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch.

Both sit high above the valley – Hohenschwangau beside the lake Alpsee on a prominent hill which is no great problem to surmount by stairs or a circuitous driveway;  Neuschwanstein high up the valley side.

There’s no easy way to Neuschwanstein:  the shuttle bus only runs in the summer;  the horse-drawn carriages are in heavy demand;  the line of least resistance is, paradoxically, to walk.  It took me over half an hour, with regular stops on the way.  Even the wheeled transport gives out well below the castle gatehouse.

Both castles operate a strict timed-ticket admission system, to the nearest five minutes, and there are no compromises for latecomers.  My guide at Hohenschwangau was audible, precise and unhurried.  Neuschwanstein was a very different matter.  When I arrived at the gatehouse there appeared to be a species of riot going on, which turned out to be a large group of Italian teenagers who stood between me and the gents, though not for long.

When we got inside we were herded round in a group of over forty, with a determined lady guide who did surprisingly well in the circumstances.  The traipse through a series of astonishing interiors, intricately decorated like a mad version of the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, is crowded with swans (hence Neuschwanstein – new-swan-stone) at every turn.

There’s little wonder that Ludwig, a seriously damaged personality, brought up by distant parents, conflicted about his sexuality and his Roman Catholicism, introverted and reclusive and addicted to building using his own rather than the state’s financial resources yet deeply in debt, was eventually dethroned by despairing practical politicians.

His mysterious death four days after his deposition secured his place as a national hero.

Neuschwanstein was opened to the public six weeks after his death, and his castles, ironically, have become a significant source of prosperity to the surrounding district.

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

Wentworth New Church

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Holy Trinity New Church, Wentworth, South Yorkshire

Holy Trinity New Church, Wentworth, South Yorkshire

The estate-church of Holy Trinity, Wentworth (1875-7), with its spire nearly two hundred feet high, was commissioned by the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam (1815-1902) and designed by John Loughborough Pearson in his scholarly, dignified Gothic Revival manner, in late thirteenth-century Geometrical style.

Holy Trinity is an imposing cruciform building with elegant rib-vaulting and a distinctly understated simplicity.  The east window (1888) is by Clayton & Bell and the west window (c1903) by Kempe.

Other windows with coloured glass are mostly given in memory of successive Agents, and in the south transept is a sequence of brasses commemorating members of the Fitzwilliam family from the generation that built the church onwards.

There is a story that the 6th Earl needed a bigger church to accommodate his large family:  certainly the pews on the north aisle are designed for children.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner [in The Buildings of England: Yorkshire West Riding (2nd edn, revised by Enid Radcliffe, Penguin 1967)] comments, “The Fitzwilliams of the day could not have spent their money more judiciously.”

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

Butcher Works

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Butcher Works, Sheffield

Butcher Works, Sheffield

In October last year the South Yorkshire Art Fund provided me with an opportunity to see Butcher Works, an unusually austere example of Sheffield’s surviving cutlery factories, dating back to 1819-20 but mostly built c1855-60, led by Oliver Jessop, the archaeologist who investigated the site before and during its redevelopment.

Here, edge-tools, cutlery and files were made by the independent workmen who were known in Sheffield as the “Little Mesters”, contracting and sub-contracting their specialised trades and, often, hiring workshop facilities from factory-owners such as William and Samuel Butcher.

Up to the end of the eighteenth-century Sheffield’s cutlers worked in small water-powered forges.  Their workshops were often referred to as “wheels”, as in the preserved Shepherd Wheel in the Porter Valley.

The name persisted when steam-power arrived, and even though the Butcher brothers’ four-storey courtyard factory stands in the middle of town on Arundel Street, where the 9th Duke of Norfolk had unsuccessfully sought to develop a select residential development, it was always known as Butcher’s Wheel.

These bleak, grimy workshops, which produced some of the finest cutlery and silverware in the world, have become rarities, and there are some moribund examples still, such as Leah’s Yard within the footprint of the stalled Sevenstone shopping development.

The last working tenants left Butcher’s Wheel in 2004, and it’s now been redeveloped as apartments above the workshops of the Academy of Makers [http://www.academyofmakers.co.uk], a gallery, the Fusion Café [http://www.academyofmakers.co.uk/fusion-cafe.html] and the Ruskin Organic Bakery.

The works is also home to Freeman College [http://www.rmt.org/freeman], which caters for marginalised students and those with special educational needs, especially those on the autistic spectrum.

The activities of the other occupiers, the craftspeople and the café provide the students with work-experience as part of the process of equipping them for independent living.

All this modern activity pays for its restoration, yet buried within are unexpected remains of its industrial past, a grinding shop (called a “hull” in Sheffield), an intact hand-forge and a magnificent Bramah pan-closet relocated from its original site next to the directors’ board room.

The informative historical information panels about Butcher Works are accessible at http://www.strazors.com/uploads/images/Butcher_Works_Panels_1-7.pdf and there’s an aerial view of the site before renovation in Nicola Wray, Bob Hawkins & Colum Giles, ‘One Great Workshop’:  the buildings of the Sheffield metal trades (English Heritage 2001), p 50.

Exploring New South Wales: Armidale Anglican Cathedral

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St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral, Armidale, stands just round the corner from its Catholic neighbour.  Though both are Gothic in style, their differences are distinctive.

St Peter’s was designed by John Horbury Hunt (1838-1904), the Canadian-born original architect of Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle (begun 1869) on the New South Wales coast and Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton (1881).

Hunt favoured brick, an unexpected material for a cathedral, because its relative cheapness ensured that as much as possible could be built with the limited amount of money available.

The first Bishop of Grafton & Armidale, James F Turner, commented, “Our architect has studied carefully to give the church a certain stateliness of character, and therein has succeeded admirably…it is real, honest, and true; and shows what may be done in a material often too little regarded, viz, common brick.”

Hunt used local blue brick sourced from clay on the Saumarez estate, with Uralla granite dressings and a scissor-truss roof.  Building began in 1873 and after two years the first phase was opened.  The vestries and chapter house were added in 1910, and the tower completed in 1938.

I visited Armidale to lecture to the local decorative and fine arts society on Chicago.  Illustrating skyscrapers in that city, I remarked the Mies van der Rohe’s IBM Tower ignores its surroundings while the earlier Wrigley Building is carefully shaped to fit into its geographical context on the bend of a river – very like, I said, the modern annexes to St Peter’s Cathedral, which blend in a neighbourly way with Hunt’s original design.

At the end the gentleman who gave the vote of thanks remarked how pleased he was that I’d mentioned the extensions to St Peter’s Cathedral because he was Tony Deakin, the architect who designed the Parish Hall:  http://focusmag.com.au/ne/interviews/tony-deakin.

When you address an audience, you never know who’s listening.

Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Gothic Down Under:  English architecture in the Antipodes explores the influence of British architects, and British-trained architects, on the design of churches and other buildings in the emerging communities of Australia and New Zealand.  For details, please click here.

Exploring New South Wales: Armidale Catholic Cathedral

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Catholic Cathedral of St Mary & St Joseph, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

Catholic Cathedral of St Mary & St Joseph, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

Sited in the midst of the Northern Tablelands above the Hunter Valley, Armidale is a strange city to British eyes:  it has two cathedrals, a university, and a population of slightly more than twenty thousand.  Its oddity to most Australians is that because of its altitude, over 3,000 feet above sea-level, it has seasons, so they call the region “New England”.

Many of the early settlers were Irish, and Catholicism has remained a significant force in the community.

The fine Catholic Cathedral of St Mary & St Joseph was designed by Joseph Ignatius Sheerin (1846-1915) & John Francis Hennessy (1853-1924) of Sydney, and built in polychrome brick and Pyrmont sandstone by the Armidale building contractor George Nott in 1911-12.

The Anglican George Nott (1865-1940) owned timber mills and brickworks in the area, and supplied the 1.1 million bricks for the cathedral, the largest project of his career.  Built in a little over twenty months, it cost A£32,000.  Its needle spire, 155 feet high, is a major landmark.

It was one of the last works of the Sheerin & Hennesssy partnership, designers of a series of prestigious Catholic buildings in and around Sydney – the Archbishop’s House (1885) and St Patrick’s Seminary, Manly (1885-1889), St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill (1884-94), St Vincent’s College, Potts Point (1886), Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church, Randwick (1888)and the Sacred Heart Monastery, West Kensington, Sydney (1895).

When St Mary & St Joseph’s Cathedral celebrated its centenary, a member of the congregation was George Nott’s daughter, 91-year-old Peggy Becke, wearing the gold chain from the watch that the parishioners presented to her father when the building was completed:  http://www.armidaleexpress.com.au/story/410529/armidale-catholic-cathedral-turns-100.

Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Gothic Down Under:  English architecture in the Antipodes explores the influence of British architects, and British-trained architects, on the design of churches and other buildings in the emerging communities of Australia and New Zealand.  For details, please click here.

Oasis of peace

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St James's Cemetery, Liverpool (1979) – Huskisson Monument in the foreground

St James’s Cemetery, Liverpool (1979) – Huskisson Monument in the foreground

A page of Liverpool City Council’s website [http://liverpool.gov.uk/leisure-parks-and-events/parks-and-greenspaces/st-james-gardens] presents the former quarry below the Anglican Cathedral as an “oasis of peace”, a bland description that matches the 1970s landscaping of one of the city’s most dramatic corners.

The stone for much of eighteenth-century Liverpool was quarried here.  As Mount Zion it was a place of resort, especially after the discovery in 1773 of a chalybeate spring which was thought good for “loss of appetite, nervous disorders, lowness of spirit, headache…proceeding from crudities of the stomach, rickets and weak eyes”.

Renamed St James’s Mount, after the newly-built adjacent parish church, around 1775, it became more genteel.  John Bridge opened “a coffee house of considerable repute…frequented principally by persons of a superior class”.  Visitors relished the contrast between the vast quarry face and the “subterraneous [entrance], supported by arches, [which] has a pleasing and romantic effect”.

When the quarry was practically exhausted in 1825 it became St James’s Cemetery, so immediately profitable that as soon as it opened in 1829 its first year of trading paid an 8% dividend.

The Liverpool architect John Foster Jnr designed a funerary chapel, the Oratory, and built a series of retaining walls, ramps and catacombs into the quarry face.  Mike Faulkner’s informative website [http://www.stjamescemetery.co.uk] provides details of the tunnels that gave access for mourners and hearses.

By the time St James’ Cemetery closed in July 1936, 57,774 burials had taken place.  From that time onwards maintenance became an increasingly severe problem.

The floor of the cemetery was almost entirely cleared by the City Council between 1969 and 1972, isolating John Foster Jnr’s magnificent 1833 mausoleum of the Liverpool MP and President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson (1770-1830).  Huskisson’s statue by John Gibson has been removed for safety.

Other celebrated Liverpudlians buried here include the architect, John Foster Junior (1786-1846), Sir William Brown (1784-1864), donor of the William Brown Library, and the much-loved Catherine “Kitty” Wilkinson (1786-1860), an Irish-born washerwoman of Denison Street.  She is famous for making her water-boiler available to maintain cleanliness during the 1832 Cholera Epidemic, “indefatigable and self-denying, she was the widow’s friend, the support of the orphan, the fearless and unwearied nurse of the sick, the originator of baths and wash-houses for the poor”.

St James’s Gardens, as it’s now known, provides a green amenity in the midst of the city.

But I miss the Gothick atmosphere of the accumulated gravestones and monuments that filled the quarry floor until 1972.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

On the margin

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Sea Marge, Overstrand, Norfolk

Sea Marge, Overstrand, Norfolk

Sir Edgar Speyer (1862-1932), was an exceptionally rich and cultured man.  He came from a German Jewish family that ran finance houses in Germany, Great Britain and the United States and he took British nationality in 1892.  He organised much of the capital that enabled the Chicago transit tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes to establish the deep-level underground railways that became London’s Bakerloo, Northern and Piccadilly lines.  After Yerkes’ death in 1905 Edgar Speyer became chairman of Underground Electric Railways of London.

He used his wealth to further his enthusiasms, funding Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts from 1902 to 1914, the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1901) and Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1910-12 Antarctic Expedition.

He was one of the millionaires who populated the quiet village of Overstrand on the north Norfolk coast at the beginning of the twentieth century.

He commissioned the prestigious architect Sir Arthur Blomfield to design Sea Marge (meaning “on the margin of the sea”) and incorporated the neighbouring property, The Gables, after the death of its owner.

The year the house was completed, 1902, Edgar Speyer married the American violinist, Leonora von Stosch (1872-1956), for whom he provided Stradivarius and Guarneri violins.   Speyer became a baronet in 1906 and a Privy Councillor in 1909.

Sir Edgar and Lady Speyer became victims of intense anti-German prejudice during the First World War, such that Speyer offered to resign from the Privy Council and revoke his baronetcy, offers that were summarily rejected by King George V and the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith.  Accusations ranged from serious charges of trading with the enemy to suggestions that he was using Sea Marge as a base from which to signal to German submarines.

Post-war in camera investigations into Speyer’s wartime conduct, however, concluded that through his international trading operations he had practically collaborated with the Germans.  Sir Edgar and Lady Speyer’s and their daughters’ British nationality was revoked:  he was removed from the Privy Council, though allowed to retain his hereditary baronetcy.  He sold up all his British business interests and his London house, and moved to New York.

There is a biography examining the case against Sir Edgar:  Antony Lentin, Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy?:  the troublesome case of Sir Edgar Speyer (Haus 2013).

Sea Marge remained in the Speyers’ hands until Sir Edgar’s death in 1932.  The purchasers, Mr and Mrs Gibbons, moved into the Coach House, and sold the main house on.  It opened as a hotel in 1935:  after closing in 1955 the property was for long neglected, but has now been fully restored and once more operates as a hotel:  http://www.seamargehotel.co.uk.

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

The 44-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Norfolk’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Castle for the weekend

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Castell Coch, Tongwynlais, Cardiff: Drawing Room chimneypiece

Castell Coch, Tongwynlais, Cardiff: Drawing Room chimneypiece

While William Burges was unhurriedly transforming Cardiff Castle for the 3rd Marquess of Bute, the question arose of what to do about the crumbling Castell Coch (the Red Castle), an outlying Bute property in Tongwynlais, north of the city centre.

Presenting William Burges with a medieval ruin inevitably led to a plan to rebuild it.  Presenting the Marquess of Bute with a project to rebuild a castle could have only one outcome.  He opened his cheque-book.

The result is a beguiling Victorian fantasy of medieval life and art, a wealthy magnate’s weekend retreat into a Gothic dream world.

Though the project was compromised by being brought to a conclusion after Burges’ death, it contains some of the finest examples of his design genius, such as Thomas Nicholls’ figures of the three Fates, Clotho spinning the thread of life, Lachesis measuring its length and Atropos with her shears.

Lord Bute’s bedroom is fairly spartan, but a spiral stair leads from it to Lady Bute’s bedroom, a huge vaulted space decorated with symbols of love.

And to ensure privacy, this High Victorian castle was fitted with a fully functioning drawbridge.

Castell Coch is administered by Cadw:  http://cadw.wales.gov.uk/daysout/castell-coch/?lang=en.

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