Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Oasis of peace

1 Reply
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

2 Replies
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

Leave a Reply
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.

 

Burges and Bute – architectural dream team

Leave a Reply
Cardiff Castle: boundary wall

Cardiff Castle, South Wales: boundary wall

John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847-1900), was born with every advantage.  His father, the second Marquess, had tapped the trading wealth of the South Wales coalfield by establishing Cardiff Docks on his ancestral lands from 1822 onwards.  John came into his vast patrimony when he was just over six months old.

Though he was a conscientious Victorian aristocrat and landowner and nurtured his great inheritance, he had time and energy to spare for his fascination with art, architectural and the medieval.

The architect William Burges (1827-1881) was also born with advantages.  His civil-engineer father, who outlived him, provided him with an ample private income, so he could travel extensively and, when he set up his practice, pick and choose his collaborators, and pick and choose his clients.

When the 3rd Marquess of Bute came of age, he called for Bruges to transform the Roman, medieval and eighteenth-century structures that made up Cardiff Castle, first into a bachelor residence which was then extended, after his marriage in 1872, into a palatial residence from which to dominate the port and city growing on the doorstep.

Burges’ capacity for solid, sculptural, dramatic skylines and mysterious, whimsical interiors makes Cardiff Castle a fascinating place.  Every surface is thronged with colour, relief and meaning.  The craftsmanship is of the highest quality.  And the humour is quirky and irreverent, like medieval manuscripts and misericords – a monkey bell-push, a crocodile sitting at the top of a bannister eyeing a baby beneath.

Such was Bruges’ creative power that his team of craftsmen – William Frame (1848-1906), Horatio Walter Lonsdale (1844-1919), the Carrarra-born sculptor Ceccardo Egidio Fucigna (1836-1884) – that after his unexpected death the work carried on for years.  The sculptor Thomas Nicholls (c1825-c1900) completed a typical piece of whimsy, the boundary wall of Cardiff Castle, bristling with escaping animals, designed in 1866 but only executed ten years after Burges’ death.

Cardiff Castle is open to the public:  http://www.cardiffcastle.com/content.asp?nav=4,57&parent_directory_id=1&id=159.

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

Exploring New South Wales: Maitland & Morpeth churches 3

Leave a Reply
St James' Church, Morpeth, New South Wales, Australia

St James’ Church, Morpeth, New South Wales, Australia

The final church that Phil and Jane Pullin showed me when I stayed with them on my ADFAS tour is a contrast to Edmund Blacket’s other churches in the area.

Whereas St Mary’s, West Maitland and St Peter’s, East Maitland replaced earlier functional buildings, St James’ Church, Morpeth [http://www.stjamesanglicanchurchmorpeth.com.au/page/315332271] is Blacket’s 1860s adaptation of an existing building of 1837-40:  he added the sanctuary and sacristy and designed the font and pulpit.

It was rebuilt by John Horbury Hunt after a fire in 1874:  he raised the nave walls and devised the lightweight hammerbeam roof, but left the tower at its original height so that it now looks undersized.

The organ (1877) is a rarity, one of the few surviving instruments by the Sydney organ-builder William Davison.  St James’ has two fine statues, of St James and the Virgin Mary, by the sculptor Englebert Piccolrauz (b 1942).

All this I would have missed as a tourist.  It makes all the difference to spend time in a foreign country working and receiving the hospitality of people who’ve lived there all their lives.

And in the Hunter Valley coalfield of New South Wales, with its Tyneside place-names, there is a constant reminder to a Brit that Australia is, in many respects, remarkably like home.

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: Maitland & Morpeth churches 2

1 Reply
St Peter's Church, East Maitland, New South Wales, Australia

St Peter’s Church, East Maitland, New South Wales, Australia

St Peter's Church, East Maitland, New South Wales, Australia (interior)

St Peter’s Church, East Maitland, New South Wales, Australia (interior)

St Peter’s Church, East Maitland (1875-85) was designed by Edmund Blacket in 1875 and built 1884-6 under the supervision of his son Cyril (1857-1937).  It is more ornate than St Mary’s, West Maitland, but lacks the intended 180-foot-high tower and spire, so that the west wall is blank apart from a clearly temporary doorway.  Another aisled church, built of local sandstone, it has an apsed east end has three traceried windows.  The interior columns are granite capped with Melbourne bluestone basalt.  St Peter’s has a fine Willis organ of 1876, installed in the church in 1886:  http://www.ohta.org.au/confs/Sydney/STPETERSANGLICAN.html.

In the years after its completion St Peter’s was richly embellished by local benefactors.  The very fine alabaster and marble pulpit by Rhodes of Birmingham dates from 1893;  the reredos is made of Oamuru stone from New Zealand, with red Girotte marble shafts from the Pyrenees and Ashburton marble from England;  the lectern dates from 1897, and the floor was tiled in 1900-4.

Blacket’s tower will presumably never be built, yet St Peter’s is as fine and impressive a Victorian church as any you could find in Britain.

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: Maitland & Morpeth churches 1

Leave a Reply
St Mary’s Church, West Maitland, New South Wales, Australia

St Mary’s Church, West Maitland, New South Wales, Australia

Phil and Jane Pullin were my final Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Society hosts, when I lectured to the Pokolbin DFAS.  I warmed to them immediately because, when I texted to say I was stuck on a train with no buffet, they greeted me on the platform with a bottle of water and a chicken sandwich.

They were also enormously helpful in filling my free time with visits to a collection of Victorian Gothic churches in around the amalgamated towns of Maitland and Morpeth, which lie at the tidal limit of the River Hunter and became an important junction on the Great Northern Railway between Sydney and Brisbane.

The modern city of Maitland is a good place to see the work of the English-born, self-taught Australian architect Edmund Blacket (1817-1883), who is best known for his St Saviour’s Cathedral, Goulbourn, New South Wales (1884) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GoulburnStSaviour%27sCathedral.jpg], St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney (1868), and the Great Hall and Quadrangle of the University of Sydney (1861) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SydneyUniversity_MainBuilding_Panorama.jpg].  He was the mentor of other major nineteenth-century Australian architects such as John Horbury Hunt (1838-1904).  Blacket is regarded as a safe, conformist architect, who seems to have been most comfortable designing small parish churches.  In fact, some of his parish churches are quite grand.

St Mary’s Church, West Maitland (1860-7) is a spacious, gracious, aisled church with twin porches and a tower added in 1880, two years after the church was consecrated.  Built of local Ravensfield stone, its oddity is the undersized west window, which lights the west gallery in which the 1881 Willis organ was placed in 1959:  http://www.maitlandanglican.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=56.

The plainer, brick sister church, St Paul’s, West Maitland (1858) is also by Edmund Blacket.  Its detached bell tower of 1888 was part of an uncompleted enlargement plan.  It is now deconsecrated:  http://www.maitlandanglican.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=57.

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.

 

Terra-cotta city: The Red Palace

Leave a Reply
Red Palace, Hockley, Birmingham

Red Palace, Hockley, Birmingham

Birmingham’s answer to New York’s Flatiron Building is commonly known as the Red Palace, standing at the sharp angle between Constitution Hill and Hampton Street.

Originally it was the factory-workshop of H B Sale, die-sinkers.

Designed by William Doubleday & James R Shaw in 1895-6, it demonstrates the value of terra-cotta as a material that was relative cheap to manufacture and produced rich architectural effects – in this case, according to Andy Foster’s Pevsner Architectural Guide, Birmingham (2005), “eclectic Gothic with Spanish touches”.

This adaptable material had obvious benefits for a commercial organisation that wished to make an impact without extravagant expense.

Its unusual layout was put to practical use.  Each floor was a triangular open-plan workshop with an office at the apex.

The modern fifth storey is unfortunate.

For years now its lower storeys have been occupied by a succession of restaurants.  The elaborate cupola is sprouting vegetation.

This fine ornament to Birmingham’s streetscape is clearly underused.

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.

Nellie’s

Leave a Reply
White Horse, Beverley, East Yorkshire

White Horse, Beverley, East Yorkshire

When I was an undergraduate at Hull University in the late 1960s, what passed for debauchery was a trip on the train to Nellie’s at Beverley.

Once I’d ascertained that Nellie’s was in fact a pub – I was mindful of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), which tells of men who went to the Bear Flag Restaurant for a sandwich – it became, and remains, a favourite.

This famous and memorable hostelry has medieval timbering but has been radically altered in and since the eighteenth century.  It belonged to St Mary’s Church (which stands at the opposite end of the street) probably from 1585, and had become an inn by 1666.

It seems to have changed little since the tenancy was taken on by a sadler, Francis Collinson, in 1887.  Mr Collinson bought the inn in 1927, and after his death it was run by his son, William, and after his death by three of William’s sisters, Nellie (after whom it is now popularly known), Ada and Dorothy, who maintained the ancient tradition of opening their private kitchen to drinkers during the evening, serving from a table beside the hand pumps and washing up with hot water from the coal-fired range.

After the three sisters died in rapid succession during 1975-6 the White Horse was sold to Samuel Smiths of Tadcaster:  under this new ownership the nineteenth-century fittings and gas lighting are lovingly preserved, but not the brick wall that served as the original gents’ lavatory.

There is a grandiose website at http://www.nellies.co.uk/abt.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber 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.

The Elwells of Beverley

Leave a Reply
45 North Bar Without, Beverley, East Yorkshire (detail)

45 North Bar Without, Beverley, East Yorkshire (detail)

Just outside Beverley’s North Bar stands a riotously decorated black-and-white revival house 4-6 North Bar Without, loaded with dormers and turrets, statues, mottoes and coats of arms, and two endearing carved caricatures of Gladstone and Disraeli, dating c1890.

This is the work of the Beverley carver James Edward Elwell, whose fine carvings can be found in churches, public buildings and houses across the East Riding.

In Beverley he executed, among much else, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic organ screen in the Minster (1878-80) and John Oldrid Scott’s reredos at St Mary’s Parish Church (1880-1).

He also provided carvings at his own house at 43 North Bar Without (Oak House) (Smith & Brodrick 1880) and the house next door, 45 North Bar Without, which he designed himself (1894).

He died in 1926 aged  ninety:  his work, much of it for the architects Temple Moore and F S Brodrick, dates from the 1880s to around 1910.

His son was Frederick William Elwell (1870-1958), a painter with a national reputation who chose to live most of his life in Beverley with his artist wife Mary Dawson, née Bishop, (1874-1952).

His portrait-subjects included King George V, whose lying-in-state he also painted, and the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, and he painted numerous civic leaders in Hull and the East Riding.  He is now most celebrated for his genre-paintings of local life, including several of the kitchen-staff at the Beverley Arms Hotel, such as ‘Preparations’ and ‘Three Maids’ (both c1940-45), which are displayed on weather-proof panels around the streets of Beverley.

By this means Beverley is embellished by the talents of both father and son.

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

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber 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.