Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

The gaiety of nations

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Gaiety Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man: marquee

Gaiety Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man: marquee

A couple of years ago I was invited to the Gaiety Theatre, Douglas to see the Douglas Choral Society’s production of Les Misérables, which is not my favourite piece of musical drama.  After three hours of Gallic posturing and carrying on (which theatre-folk refer to as The Glums, in tribute to the 1950s radio-programme Take It From Here), I commented to my host, my Isle of Man friend John, that though it wasn’t my favourite show I imagined we’d seen the best theatrical production on the Gaiety stage for at least ten years.

The Gaiety is a delightful theatre, one of Frank Matcham’s best survivors.  Dating from 1900, the heyday of the Manx tourist boom, it has superb fibrous plasterwork by De Jong & Co, extravagant house-tabs dripping with ropes and tassels, and the only surviving example of a Corsican trap – an essential requirement for Dionysius Lardner Boucicault’s melodrama, The Corsican Brothers (1852), which doesn’t often get an airing.

This gorgeous jewel of Victorian entertainment struggled for years to earn its keep as a cinema, and was rescued by the Isle of Man Government in 1971.  It could have been pulled down, but was restored in 1976.  It’s by far the most attractive cultural venue on the island, and it serves local communities and holiday visitors in conjunction with the adjacent Villa Marina.

Early this year John’s then-teenage son, Matthew, texted me to ask if he needed to see Miss Saigon.  Yes, I said, most definitely.  Indeed, I said, I’d get on a boat to see it if it was performed by the Douglas Choral Society.

Miss Saigon (1989) is the follow-up work to Les Misérables (1980), and was Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s second successful assault on the West End and Broadway.  It’s based on Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.  It’s a Kleenex job.  Complete with helicopter.

So I enjoyed a captivating evening in Frank Matcham’s stalls, watching the best of Manx theatrical talent pull out all the stops.  Rebecca Lawrence (Kim), Jonathan Sleight (Chris), David Artus (Engineer), Alex Toohey (John) and Kristene Sutcliffe (Ellen) gave performances which were utterly indistinguishable from the professional theatre, and they were backed up by scores of on-stage, back-stage and front-of-house workers.

What more could anyone ask of a Saturday night? – Matthew’s twentieth-birthday dinner at the excellent Coast Bar & Brasserie of the Claremont Hotel [http://www.sleepwellhotels.com/hotels/isle_of_man/claremont/restaurant.htm], the best show in town in a Frank Matcham theatre, and walking home along the gently curving Loch Promenade looking out to Douglas Bay.

This is what Dr Johnson meant by “the harmless stock of human pleasure”.

The Gaiety Theatre website is at http://www.gov.im/villagaiety.  The Douglas Choral Union is at http://www.douglaschoralunion.im/index.php.

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.

Fishy business

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Former Royal Aquarium, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Former Royal Aquarium, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

The Hollywood Cinema on Great Yarmouth’s seafront commemorates a time when local businessmen hoped to make money out of people watching fish.

Yarmouth entrepreneurs hoped to build on the success of the Brighton Aquarium of 1872 by offering “aquaria exhibitions, combined with attractions of a more special and amusing nature” which meant restaurants, billiard rooms, croquet lawns and a skating rink in what a modern journalist described as “a grotesque mock Gothic cathedral of leisure”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, less than half the required £50,000 capital was forthcoming, and the London promoters of the Great Yarmouth & Eastern Counties Aquarium Company pulled out, leaving local shareholders to lower their sights and open a more modest facility which failed to attract visitors.

A contemporary commented that “wretched management was not an unimportant factor”:  the magistrates’ refusal of a drama licence was unhelpful;  apart from watching the fish which – to be fair – included sharks, giant crabs, conger eels, turtles, porpoises and octopi, with crocodiles, alligators and seals in large ponds, the entertainments on offer were the skating rink, military bands, refreshments and a reading room.  The Prince of Wales visited in 1881.  The place closed down in 1882.

The building reopened as the Royal Aquarium, extended at the cost of a further £10,000, in 1883.  The major asset of the reopened building was its new manager, an Edgware Road caterer, John William Nightingale.  He engaged such crowd-pulling celebrities as Sir Ernest Shackleton, Oscar Wilde, General William Booth and David Lloyd George.

There’s clearly limited demand for gazing at fish.  The Scarborough People’s Palace & Aquarium of 1875-7 [see Scarborough’s Rotunda] ultimately became an amusement arcade.

J W Nightingale became a power in the Great Yarmouth entertainment industry:  by the time of his death in 1911, he had purchased the Royal Aquarium, bought and replaced the old wooden Britannia Pier and also owned the Theatre Royal, the Royal Assembly Rooms and the Royal and Victoria Hotels.

In 1925 the Aquarium tanks were stripped out and a second “Little Theatre” auditorium added.

In a further refurbishment in 1970, the remaining evidence of the original Aquarium decoration briefly came to light.  In what had been the Grand Saloon, 193 feet by 60 feet, Doulton tiling depicting freshwater birds on one side and sea-birds on the other was found in situ, and a bread-oven was discovered in the basement, extending thirty feet under Euston Road.

When I ran the Norfolk’s Seaside Heritage tour in September 2011 I asked the manager, Paul Allen, if there was any possibility of seeing these remains.

Understandably he was disinclined to rip up the floorboards on a Saturday morning.

One day in the future, when this long-lived building is adapted to yet another use, vestigial remains of its original purpose will once again see daylight.

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.

Pier excellence

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Grand Hotel & Pier, Llandudno

Grand Hotel & Pier, Llandudno

Llandudno Pier is one of the finest unspoilt British piers, and it’s always been my favourite because it’s the one I remember, as a child, still in use for its original purposes.

Seaside piers were, after all, primarily landing stages, which quickly gained an entertainment function because they offered landlubber holidaymakers the experience of being out at sea without the inconvenience of sea-sickness.

The main section of the Llandudno Pier by the engineer James Brunlees, 1,200 feet long, opened on August 1st 1877.  The Baths, Reading Room and Billiard Hall alongside were reopened as the Baths Hotel in 1879, and a spur was added linking the Pier to the promenade in 1884.  Alongside this the Pier Pavilion, a huge glass structure 204 feet long and between 84 and 104 feet wide, was opened in September 1886.  Its basement contained a swimming pool 160 feet by 48 feet, then one of the largest in existence.

The Baths Hotel was replaced in 1900 by the existing Grand Hotel, designed by James Francis Doyle.  The Pier Pavilion, having stood derelict in the ownership of a developer who famously didn’t develop, was destroyed by fire on February 13th 1994:  [See http://llandudnoandcolwynbay.blogspot.com/2009/07/pier-pavilion-llandudno.html and http://llandudnoandcolwynbay.blogspot.com/2009/08/exploration.html].

When we stayed in Llandudno in the 1950s one of the highlights was a paddle-steamer trip from Llandudno Pier to Menai Bridge and back on one or other of the Liverpool & North Wales Steamship Company steamships, St Tudno or St Seiriol [http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/LNWSS3.html].

The trip, which we did on more than one occasion, included chugging round the enigmatically inaccessible Puffin Island, with its mysterious hill top tower, and gazing from Telford’s suspension bridge at the beached wreck of HMS Conway.

Puffin Island [Ynys Seiriol] was part of the Bulkeley family’s Baron Hill estate, of which the derelict Palladian house by Samuel Wyatt is illustrated at http://www.welshruins.co.uk/photo2076816.html and http://www.urbexforums.co.uk/showthread.php/10992-Baron-Hill-Mansion-Beaumaris-Jan-2011.

The tower forms part of the remains of one of the stations on the semaphore telegraph system that brought news of incoming ships from Holyhead to Liverpool [see Frank Large’s detailed study, Faster Than the Wind: A History of and a Guide to the Liverpool to Holyhead Telegraph (Avid 1998)].  More details of the island, and the opportunity to take a close look at it, are at http://www.photographers-resource.co.uk/locations/Routes/Islands/LG/Anglesey/Puffin_Island.htm.

What we knew as HMS Conway was originally HMS Nile, launched in 1839 and used as a Liverpool-based training vessel until, while being towed through the Menai Strait in 1953, she grounded and broke her back.  She was eventually destroyed by fire three years later.  A detailed account is at http://www.hmsconway.org/RootFolder/Assets/Home_Page.htm.

The Isle of Man Steam Packet Company maintained a tenuous steamer service to and from Llandudno Pier, and the celebrated PS Waverley and MV Balmoral made occasional visits until the landing stage was declared unsafe in 2007.

Nevertheless, the Pier itself appears to be in good order, and it’s an essential part of the Llandudno experience to stroll to the end of the pier, watch the fishermen and have either a cup of tea or an alcoholic drink in the bar, very much as the Victorian patrons would have done 130 years ago.

Descriptions of Llandudno Pier are at http://www.piers.org.uk/pierpages/NPSllandudno.html and http://the-pier.co.uk/llandudno-pier.

Blog-articles about other piers are at Lost resort in Yorkshire, Stars on the street, End of the pier show, Exploring Australia 10:  St Kilda and Wasting asset.

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.

 

Between two Ormes

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Glan y Mor Parade, Llandudno,

Glan y Mor Parade, Llandudno,

Llandudno is a beautifully unspoilt Victorian holiday resort because the freeholds are still largely owned by the Mostyn Estate, which dictated the layout, the width of the streets and the height of the buildings, and has never allowed razzmatazz on the seafront (or anywhere else, for that matter):  http://www.mostyn-estates.co.uk/history.htm.

In the 1830s, before anyone even thought of building a holiday resort, it could have been a replacement for Holyhead.

At the beginning of the age of steam railways, there was a problem in speeding up the Irish mails that went by horse-drawn stage-coach along Thomas Telford’s road across Anglesey because the Admiralty insisted on a high-level bridge over the Menai Strait. 

George Stephenson seriously suggested drawing railway carriages by cable across Telford’s suspension road-bridge of 1826, which couldn’t cope with the weight of even the earliest locomotives.

The St George’s Harbour & Railway Company proposed a rail-served new port, to be called St George, beside the Great Orme.  This would bring the journey-time from London to Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) in good weather to 19½ hours, and avoid the need for a high-level railway bridge to cross the Menai Straits.

A rival scheme to avoid Anglesey was proposed between London, Worcester, Bala, Ffestiniog, Tremadog and Pwllheli to a port at Porthdinllaen, the only safe haven on the north-west coast of the Lleyn peninsula.  The Porthdinllaen Harbour Company, originally established in 1804-8, apparently still exists:  its premises on what would have been the harbour-front now belong to the National Trust:  http://www.walesdirectory.co.uk/Towns_in_Wales/Porth_Dinllaen_Town.htm.

Neither scheme gained much favour:  the Railway Magazine of October 1838 argued that if Irish ferries had to pass Holyhead they might as well also pass Ormes Bay and sail directly into Liverpool.

Both schemes were rejected by a Treasury Commission in 1839-40, which accepted the Admiralty’s uncompromising view that Ormes Bay and Porthdinllaen were alike “mere roadsteads”.

So instead, the Mostyn estate developed the flat land between the Great and Little Orme promontories from 1849 onwards as a holiday resort which became known, after the church of St Tudno on the headland, as Llandudno.

It’s perhaps as well:  the idea of carrying the Irish mails through Wales via a harbour named after the English patron saint was, at the very least, tactless.

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.

 

Another Albert

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Stanley Dock, Liverpool (1983)

Stanley Dock, Liverpool (1983)

Stanley Dock, in Liverpool’s north docks, comes as a surprise to those who only know the celebrated tourist honey-pot of Albert Dock.

Built soon after Albert by the same engineer, Jesse Hartley, and opened in 1848, Stanley is the only one of the Liverpool docks to lie inland from the dock road.  This is because it forms the link between the dock system and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

Only in recent years has this link been extended through what remains of the north docks, across Pier Head in a cutting and into the Albert Dock complex.  Now you can sail your narrow boat all the way into the heart of the rejuvenated city centre:  http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/liverpoolcanallink/link60.htm.

Stanley Dock itself has hardly been touched since the Second World War.  Its austere brick warehouses, with iron columns and semicircular crane-arches, are very similar to the buildings at Albert and Wapping Docks.  Adjacent are entertaining Hartley buildings such as the battlemented gatepiers and the Hydraulic Power Centre (1854).

The southern half of the dock was filled in at the end of the nineteenth century to accommodate Anthony George Lyster’s gigantic Tobacco Warehouse (1900).  Probably the largest warehouse in the world, this impressive structure held raw tobacco in bond.  Alongside is the King’s Pipe, in which scrap tobacco was burnt to avoid paying duty.

The Tobacco Warehouse is gigantic, thirteen storeys (125 feet) high and forty-two bays wide with a floor-area of 36 acres.  Joseph Sharples, in his Pevsner Architectural Guide Liverpool (2004) points out that its great depth and low ceilings (only 7 feet 2 inches because the tobacco was stored in short stacks to prevent damage) have been an obstacle to redevelopment since it came out of use in 1980.

Now at last it looks as if Stanley Dock and the Tobacco Warehouse are ready, after years of planning,  for redevelopment:  see http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/capital-of-culture/capital-of-culture-liverpool-news/2003/12/08/100m-plan-for-tobacco-building-100252-13704568/ and http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2011/12/07/stanley-dock-tobacco-warehouse-residents-will-share-development-with-bats-92534-29908689/2/.

This enormous project will require the disruption of one Liverpool’s Sunday-morning amusements, the Heritage Market:  http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news//tm_headline=dock-market-fear-for-jobs&method=full&objectid=18817453&siteid=50061-name_page.html.

There is a superb series of images of the Tobacco Warehouse in its current state at http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=797873#post797873.

The photographer, an urban explorer who goes by the name ‘rookinella’, says, “Stanley Dock has made for a fine night’s sleep the few times that we’ve been to Liverpool.  Picturesque views, period features and private en-suite bathrooms for everyone…”  What can they mean?

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

Reformed chapel

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Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Former Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2012)

Some buildings stick in the memory for entirely sentimental reasons.  I passed the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield every morning in my first five years of schooling.

My Auntie Nellie lived literally next door.  It formed the background to my earliest memories of backyard Bonfire Nights when Uncle Charlie was in charge of the box of matches:  in Coronation year the biggest bang of all came when Auntie Nellie’s new pressure-cooker, inexpertly screwed down, exploded and spattered mushy peas all over the kitchen ceiling.

My latest memory of this thriving temple of Methodism is of my cousin Cathryn singing at a chapel anniversary in the early 1960s.

It’s an austerely attractive, utterly unremarkable building, unlisted, invisible in the Sheffield Local Studies Library index.

Built in 1890, its foundation stones were laid by a star-studded cast of Sheffield’s most important Methodists, such as Jethro and Samson Chambers, Robert Hadfield and Frederick Mappin – all of them men of steel with Attercliffe connections, the latter two later to become baronets.

Its registration for marriages was cancelled because it was no longer used for worship in 1966.

My 1977 image of the building shows the brickwork still encrusted with industrial grime and most of the windows smashed.

No-one would have given tuppence for its chances of survival.

Nowadays it sparkles:  it’s well-maintained;  its windows are renewed and its brickwork is beautifully cleaned.  It serves as the Jamiyat Tableegh ul Islam Mosque.

So historic buildings which are not worth listing can survive if someone finds an appropriate use for them that will justify their upkeep.

Gorton renaissance

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Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

In November 1861 four Franciscan friars arrived in Manchester to set up the Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, serving the working-class community that grew up round the nearby railway works.

Their buildings were designed by Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75), who possessed much of the vigour of his father, A W N Pugin, and were constructed largely by the physical labour of the brothers and their parishioners.

The first stone was laid on May 24th 1862, and the three wings of the original monastery were complete by 1867.  To raise funds for the Infant School in 1867 Father Francis hired the Free Trade Hall for a bazaar which raised £1,000.

E W Pugin’s magnificent church, 184ft long, 98ft wide and 100ft high, dominates the streets of Gorton and is clearly visible from central Manchester.

By 1900 the Catholic population of Gorton had increased from 300 to over 6,000.  The fathers saw the parish change from a poor village community, initially dependent on cotton (and badly hit by the effects of the American Civil War), into an industrial inner-city suburb.

For almost a century they provided spiritual and pastoral support to the people of Gorton, and – because many of those people were drawn from Wexford, Waterford and Cork – Gaelic classes, lantern lectures on Irish history and St Patrick’s Day celebrations.  They also exported missionaries to China, Peru and elsewhere.

The surrounding nineteenth-century housing was cleared in the early 1970s, and the Monastery became unsustainable.  Eventually, the Franciscans sold the site for £75,000 to a developer who planned to divide the church into a seven-storey apartment-block but instead went bankrupt.

The abandoned buildings were quickly and badly vandalised.  Lead and slates were removed, and there were repeated arson attacks.  Virtually all the decorative features of interest or value were removed or smashed.

In 1997 the Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust bought the Monastery for £1 and began the formidable task of bringing the place back into use.  Cornering funds was not the least of their labours:  the Architectural Heritage Fund, English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, New East Manchester (NEM) and the North West Development Agency (NWDA) between them chipped in millions.

Fixtures that had disappeared in the dark days of dereliction have returned.  A complete set of twelve statues, stolen from the lofty nave arcades, famously appeared as garden ornaments at Sotheby’s:  Manchester City Council bought them for £25,000 and stored them until September 2011 when they returned to the site for restoration.

The art-dealer Patricia Wengraft [http://www.patwengraf.com/Patricia-Wengraf-Fine-European-Sculpture-and-Works-Art-Intro-DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=1] secured the return of the huge crucifix:  http://www.manchester.gov.uk/news/article/1954/monasterys_giant_crucifix_is_hoisted_back_into_place.  The chains to support it had been handed in mysteriously some time before.

I remember the first public opening in September 2005:  people queued down the street, showing immediately how much St Francis’ Monastery meant to local people who’d grown up, been baptised or married here, and had been uprooted.

The Monastery reopened fully as a community, conference and events centre in 2007.  It’s open to the public most Sundays:  see what’s on offer at http://www.themonastery.co.uk/Whats-on.html.

I would have liked to see something similar happen to St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield.

Just because a place of worship is no longer needed for worship doesn’t prevent it having enormous value to people.

But making the transition requires enormous energy, imagination, devotion, acumen – and the creative support of people in power.

Shiregreen waits…

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

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

Matthew 12:12

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Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

When I visited the Auckland Decorative & Fine Arts Society to give a lecture, my hostess Anne Gambrill picked me up at the airport and swept me off for lunch to the Pah Homestead, which is – as the old V&A advert might have said – a very fine café with an art gallery attached [http://www.pahcafe.co.nz/index.cfm].

The homestead was built for a businessman, James Williamson, in 1877-9, to designs by the father-and-son team Edward (c1824-1895) and Thomas (1855–1923) Mahoney, who also built St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland.

It ceased to be a home as early as 1888, after Williamson’s death, and has been successively used by the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.  Fortunately, although not a stick of furniture remains, the building itself is remarkably intact and rich in plasterwork, joinery, parquet flooring and marble fireplaces.

Auckland City Council purchased it in 2002 to develop it and the surrounding park as an amenity.  As the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, the Pah Homestead opened to the public in August 2010.

It is now the home of the James Wallace Art Trust, which collects and displays contemporary New Zealand art.  Sir James Wallace, who has been collecting since the early 1960s, admitted, “I learned enough trying to paint to know that I was no good at it.”  Instead, he invested massively in young artists:  the result is a “diary collection”, from which nothing has been sold.  There is an entertaining attempt to interview Sir James at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts/news/article.cfm?c_id=544&objectid=10746252.

Of all that was on offer when I visited the Pah, I most enjoyed Matthew 12/12 by Gregor Kregar (b 1972) – seventy-two ceramic sheep, all in woolly jumpers, crowded into one corner of the room by a ceramic sheepdog:  http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O5.html.  You could say it’s a fresh interpretation of New Zealand lamb.

In addition to live sheep [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O2.html, http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O3.html and http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O4.html] Gregor Kregar, who is based in Auckland, also does ceramic pigs [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O7.html] and mongrels [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O6.html].  Perhaps live pigs and mongrels are less biddable than sheep.
 
You can take a virtual tour of the current exhibition at the Pah Homestead at http://wallaceartstrust.org.nz/wallace-art-awards/virtual-gallery.  Indeed, you can change the colour of the walls if you like.

 

Edgwarebury

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Edgwarebury, Hertfordshire

Edgwarebury, Hertfordshire

Branching off Station Road, in the middle of the North London suburb of Edgware, is Edgwarebury Lane, lined with elegant thirties houses.

It crosses the busy A41 Edgware Way, otherwise the Watford by-pass, where pedestrians are provided with a very grand footbridge.

North of the A41 the houses eventually give way to tennis courts and a cemetery, and the road diminishes into a bridleway, though the bridge over the M1 motorway is built to main-road dimensions.

Edgwarebury Lane then climbs steeply past the Dower House, and eventually reaches the former Edgwarebury Hotel, now the Laura Ashley The Manor Hotel:  https://www.lauraashleyhotels.com/en/themanorelstree/thehotel.html.

The name, and the persistence of the route against the grain of the modern road-system, suggest that Edgwarebury must have been at least as important as the once-rural village of Edgware.

This is, of course, not a sensible or practical way of reaching the Edgwarebury Hotel.  It’s reached via Barnet Lane and the last few hundred yards of the old lane.

The hotel was originally Edgwarebury House, the residence of Sir Trevor Dawson (1866-1931), managing director of the armaments company Vickers Ltd.

As an essay in Victorian or Edwardian black-and-white revival, it has one attractive show front, looking south across a gently-sloping garden surrounded by trees and looking across to distant views of London.

Within, the major rooms are embellished with antique carved timber and stained glass.  It has all the hallmarks of a late nineteenth-century interest in collecting architectural antiques.

It served as a location for the Hammer horror film The Devil Rides Out (1968), the rather more cheerful Stardust (1974) and much else.

It’s my favourite place to stay in the London area, whenever its special deals are cheaper than Premier Inn.

I like to walk down Barnet Lane, where the local motorists often drive at absurd speeds, to the crossroads and eat at the Eastern Brasserie [0208-207-6212], which serves the sort of Indian meals where you savour every mouthful, from the popadoms at the start to the slices of orange at the finish.

It’s always been one of my favourite start-of-the-weekend-in-London experiences.

There is an informative article about Edgewarebury Lane at http://hidden-london.com/gazetteer/edgwarebury.

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

Trouser town

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Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

The steep downhill walk from Heptonstall into the Calder valley gives spectacular views of the town of Hebden Bridge which stands at the confluence of the River Calder and the Hebden Water.   Glaciers formed these valleys, so they have hanging tributaries which maximise the head of water available to mill engineers.

As the textile industry became mechanised from the late eighteenth century onwards, the old domestic industry of gave way to the first generation of water mills.  Then, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, steam-powered mills, no longer dependent on a rapid flow of water, moved out into the flatter land of the valley-floor.

Transport became industrialised too.   The packhorse system was replaced by turnpikes from 1771-2, the Rochdale Canal, built 1794-8, and the railway (1840-1).

Often known as “Trouser Town”, Hebden Bridge prospered until the post-war period, and then its economy crashed.

Between 1955 and 1965 thirty-three mills closed around Hebden Bridge, and 60% of the local shops went out of business.  The Hebden Bridge Co-operative Society went bankrupt when one of its officials defaulted with its reserves.  Cottages changed hands for as little as a penny, and the local planning authorities initially despaired of attracting new industry to the district.

Within a few years, however, the cheap housing, attractive surroundings and easy rail links to Manchester and Leeds brought a variety of incomers – dormitory commuters, home-workers such as writers and artists and a well-assimilated lesbian community [see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16962898].

Houses that couldn’t be given away in the early sixties traded for £300 in 1975 and twenty-five years later were worth £65,000.  Even in the current static market, you can’t find two-bedroomed accommodation in the town for much less than £120,000.

Hebden Bridge now boasts nearly two hundred retailers, including a wide range of antique-dealers, booksellers and music-stores.  It’s also a minor capital of culture.

From the early 1970s it was the one of the homes of the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes (1930-1998), who was born down the valley at Mytholmroyd.  His house at Lumb Bank is now one of the writing centres of the Arvon Foundation [http://www.arvonfoundation.org/course.php?genre=&tutor=&month=&centre=2], founded by two of Hughes’ friends, John Fairfax and John Moat.

The Blackburn-born sculptor Edward Cronshaw (born 1959), best known for his statue ‘The Great Escape’, a popular Liverpool meeting-place often referred to as “The Horse’s Balls” [http://www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk/equestrian/great01.html], lived in Hebden Bridge until he moved up the valley to Todmorden.

And Margaret Thatcher’s famed press secretary, Bernard Ingham, began his career on the Hebden Bridge Times.

Take a look at what’s on in Hebden Bridge – http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/events/index.html:  it’s a hive of activity.

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.