Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Knightsbridge of the North

“In Briggate nothing of note,” is Pevsner’s comment on the ancient heart of Leeds, an oddly offhand remark which is immediately contradicted when he goes on briefly to mention two “examples of the characteristic Leeds Arcades”.

When the existing tiny settlement was developed as a new town in the early thirteenth century the landholdings were laid out as narrow burgage plots on Briggate, the approach to the bridge over the River Aire.

Many of these boundaries have survived to the present day, and in the nineteenth century they engendered the city’s distinctive arcades as places for shopping and entertainment.

Along with the surviving City Markets the arcades provide a wonderfully atmospheric experience of the best of Victorian retail enterprise, and are sufficiently well recognised to gain the attention and investment of present-day developers.

The earliest of these long corridor-thoroughfares, covering over the ancient yards and providing access to premises away from the main street, is Thornton’s Arcade (1877-8), built on the site of the Old Talbot Inn and Yard by Charles Thornton.

Several imitators followed – the Queen’s Arcade (1888-9), the Grand Arcade adjacent to the earlier Grand Theatre (1896-9 for the New Briggate Arcade Co), and the Victoria Arcade (1898).

Most sumptuous and celebrated of all was the complex designed from 1898 onwards for the Leeds Estate Co by the great theatre-architect, Frank Matcham, consisting of County Arcade, Cross Arcade and the open Queen Victoria Street and King Edward Street, all designed in “freestyle” with mahogany shopfronts and elaborate façades in Burmantofts terracotta.

Frank Matcham based the shopping arcades on the opulent Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1877) in Milan, and within the same block of buildings stood his Empire Theatre, built at the same time but demolished in 1961.

The County and Cross Arcades came into their own as a result of Prudential Portfolio Managers’ commissioning of a high-quality redevelopment scheme by Derek Latham & Co, completed in 1990 and named the Victoria Quarter.

For this scheme Matcham’s arcades were lovingly restored, with new mosaics by Joanna Veevers and ironwork by Jim Horrobin. In addition, Queen Victoria Street was roofed in a sympathetic modern style which features nine hundred square yards of stained glass by Brian Clarke with iron street-furniture by Alan Dawson.

The spirit of the late-Victorian covered malls has been reaffirmed and updated by enclosing Matcham’s outside walls and encouraging passers-by to slow their walking pace and look upwards.

And on the footprint of the Empire Theatre an unremarkable 1960s shopping mall has given way to the first branch of Harvey Nicholls outside London, opened in 1996.

Since that time, Leeds has continued to develop as the “Knightsbridge of the North”. The Light (2001) occupies a site south of the Headrow. Trinity Leeds (2013) embraces the eighteenth-century Church of the Holy Trinity on Boar Lane, and Victoria Gate was opened alongside the Victoria Quarter in 2016 with a distinctive flagship John Lewis store.

And yet the burgage plots remain.

The intact and celebrated City Varieties music hall, dating from 1865 and originally Thornton’s Varieties, stands near Charles Thornton’s arcade, embedded within the block of buildings and completely devoid of any façade, and in a narrow alley off Briggate stands Whitelock’s, a three-hundred-year-old pub-restaurant that was originally the Turk’s Head, described by John Betjeman as “the very heart of Leeds”.

For all these reasons Leeds is a place to shop until you drop, and afterwards eat, drink and be merry.

Leadenhall Market

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Leadenhall Market is a sumptuous architectural surprise at the very heart and centre of the City of London.

It’s built over parts of the forum and basilica of Roman Londinium, from which in 1803 a mosaic was excavated on the premises of the East India Company. This artefact was not well treated and clumsily restored, but eventually found its way to the British Museum in 1880.

In the early Middle Ages a market for poultry, cheese and butter grew around Gracechurch Street as an overflow from the main market at Cheapside, and in 1411 Richard Whittington (c1354-1423), famed in his day as a wealthy philanthropist and latterly as a figure in folk-tales and pantomimes, gave the lead-roofed Leaden Hall to the City of London, which still owns the site.

It remained a popular food market for centuries, and in the fifteenth century dealt in wool and leather. In the early seventeenth century Leadenhall Market had a local monopoly for the sale of cutlery.

The market buildings were damaged in the Great Fire of 1666, yet the irregular medieval street layout was undisturbed when in 1880-81 the City authorities decided to clear away the scruffy and smelly meat and hide market in favour of a “respectable arcade” for a poultry market.

This was designed by the City Architect, Sir Horace Jones (1819-1887), who had already designed Billingsgate (1874-78) and Smithfield (1866-83) markets. His final and most famous commission, which he did not live to see complete, was the architectural treatment of Tower Bridge, designed in 1884 and completed in 1894.

His model for Leadenhall Market was the impressive and technically advanced Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1877) in Milan, designed by Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-1877).

Like his Italian counterpart Sir Horace Jones made full use of iron and glass in an eclectic design which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner applauded: “…as gloriously commercial as a circus poster”. The building bristles with silver dragons which recall the supporters of the City coat of arms. Its richly coloured interiors were vigorously restored in 1990-91, and it’s a welcome bravura contrast to the sober architecture of much of the City.

After centuries of commercial enterprise it now also has cultural fame as the location, in the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2000-01), of Diagon Alley and the Leaky Cauldron pub.

Milan’s drawing room

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The magnificently named Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (in blunt English, King Victor Emmanuel II’s Shopping Centre) is an architectural jewel.

Stretching from the square, Piazza del Duomo, in front of Milan’s magnificent cathedral to the home of the legendary La Scala theatre, Piazza della Scala, the Galleria is colloquially known as “Milan’s drawing room” (il Salotto di Milano), one of the great formal spaces which distinguish the city.

Its architect, Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-1877), after twelve years’ work on the gallery’s construction, fell to his death during a final inspection two days before the royal opening by the king whose name it bears.

Mengoni combined splendid décor with engineering virtuosity to provide two barrel-vaulted, top-lit, galleried passages intersecting at an octagon surmounted by an iron-and-glass dome 123 feet in diameter and 56 feet high.

It was by no means the first such covered shopping arcade in a major city. The genre dates back to the Parisian Passage des Panoramas (1800), London’s Burlington Arcade (1818) and the Royal Saint-Hubert Galleries in Brussels (1847), but the Milan Galleria – larger than any of its predecessors – presented an unprecedented spectacle for shoppers.

It inspired a succession of splendid malls such as the Galleria Umberto I in Naples (Emanuele Rocco, 1890) and two of Britain’s finest arcades, the Leadenhall Arcade (Sir Horace Jones, 1881) in the City of London and County Arcade, Leeds (Frank Matcham, 1898-1904).

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is, inevitably, the sort of shopping opportunity where if you need to ask the price you can’t afford the goods.

It’s the prime Milanese location for Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Prada, Swarovski and Louis Vuitton – brands that can position two pairs of shoes in a sumptuously decorated window and wait for the customers to stroll in. Most visitors, of course, look at the windows and stroll on.

McDonalds maintained a discreet presence here for twenty years, but were let go when the lease came up for renewal. They were compensated by premises nearby.

The mosaic floor under the octagon is embellished with the arms of Milan and the three major cities of the Kingdom of Italy – Rome, Florence and Turin – which was united in 1861, the year Mengoni produced the Galleria’s original design.

The arms of the city of Turin illustrate an unmistakably masculine bull, and the Milanese custom is to place your heel on the testicles of the animal and spin 360° for luck. Indeed, if you do this on the stroke of midnight on December 31st you can expect good fortune for the whole year.

The result is that the poor bull’s genitals became entirely obliterated.

I didn’t see this performance when I visited, though I did see an extremely large gentleman sitting, like Buddha, in the middle of one of the coats of arms, while his loved ones took his photo on their phones.

He didn’t spin on his axis.

Liverpool’s vanished necropolis

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Grant Gardens (formerly Low Hill Cemetery), Everton, Liverpool

People who know Liverpool well will be aware of St James’s Cemetery which lies in the eighteenth-century quarry below the site of the twentieth-century Anglican Cathedral. Opened in 1829, it’s the well-known resting place of nineteenth-century Liverpudlians but it’s not the first such cemetery in Liverpool.

The Low Hill General Cemetery was opened in 1825 where Brunswick Street becomes West Derby Road on the approach to Everton – a compact, level five-acre site around which the Liverpool architect John Foster Jnr placed boundary walls and an austere but elegant Greek Revival entrance.

Its title “General Cemetery” indicated that it was open to any who did not wish to be buried according to the rites of the Church of England:

The chapel will be at the service of such persons who may wish to use it, and any religious funeral ceremony may be formed in it by the minister, or other person chosen by the parties who may require its use, provided such ceremony is not an outrage upon the decencies of life or offensive to civilised society…or, if preferred, the interment may be made without any form or religious rite.

The Necropolis Burial Ground, as it came to be called, remained a popular burial place throughout the mid-Victorian period, until in the late 1890s it became full with eighty thousand interments, and was closed by the City Council as insanitary.

The buildings were demolished and the gravestones cleared, but the bodies remain in situ beneath the blank lawns that have replaced the flower beds of Grant Gardens (named after the chairman of the Parks & Gardens Committee), which opened in 1914.

Nothing above ground survives of John Foster Jnr’s design. The existing ornamental gateposts bear no resemblance to the entrance in early twentieth-century photographs, nor are they in the same position: Liverpool Necropolis Information – Toxteth Park Cemetery.

No-one would recognise the site now as a place of burial. However, on at least one occasion dog-walkers in Grant Gardens were made disconcertingly aware of what lies beneath. In February 2021 a sinkhole appeared caused by an incorrectly backfilled crypt: Sinkhole appears after former crypt collapses at mass grave site – Liverpool Echo.

There is a compilation of newspaper reports of burials at the Necropolis at Necropolis burial ground (old-merseytimes.co.uk ).

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

Forty Bridges

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Great Northern Railway Pinxton Branch: Giltbrook Viaduct (1973)

One of the highlights of my freelance history lecturing work is speaking to the Kimberley Historical Society, north of Nottingham, where I’m made welcome and feel I know many of the members after repeated visits.

Almost invariably, my lecture is introduced by the chairman, Roy Plumb, and a few years ago I looked forward to visiting as a guest to sit back and listen to Roy lecture on the railways of Kimberley and the neighbouring settlement of Awsworth.

It didn’t work out because of a mix-up of dates, but I eventually caught up with Roy’s presentation when he spoke to the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct at the Hogs Head Pub and Restaurant at Awsworth on January 31st this year.

Roy continues to use a Carousel projector to show his slides, and achieves a clarity and precision that rivals digital projection. He also has a steady hand with a laser pointer – a skill which I lack – and his account of the growth and decline of the local railways from 1797 until the early 1960s was masterly.

Two rival railway companies served the area between the Erewash and Leen valleys, the Midland and the Great Northern, bitter rivals trying to grab the coal trade from each other. The Great Northern’s ambitious Derbyshire & Staffordshire Extension opened in 1878, running to Derby Friargate and beyond and with a branch up the Erewash Valley to Pinxton, and the Midland’s Bulwell-Bennerley Branch began working freight trains a year later.

Both lines entailed heavy civil engineering. The Great Northern built the now-celebrated Bennerley Viaduct, which survived because its wrought-iron construction made demolition uneconomic in the 1970s.

At Awsworth Junction, where the Pinxton branch diverged from the Great Northern main line, the Giltbrook Viaduct curved across a road, two Midland Railway lines and the Greasley Arm of the Nottingham Canal. Almost a third of a mile long, it was known locally as the Forty Bridges, though there were in fact forty-three arches,

Two arches, 8 and 23, were occupied by four-storey dwellings, which were used by construction workers and later served as an air-raid shelter for Awsworth schoolchildren during the First World War. Their chimney pots graced the viaduct’s parapet.

This magnificent sinuous structure has disappeared because unlike the Bennerley Viaduct its brick-arch construction made it practical to demolish. It was taken down in 1973, and much of the trackbed of the Pinxton Branch as far as Eastwood became the A610 trunk road. Local people of a certain age still bemoan the loss of a magnificent landmark; younger people haven’t a clue it ever existed.

If I’ve read the 1899-1900 25-inch Ordnance Survey sheet correctly, the Hogs Head pub stands on or near the site of Gilt Briggs Farm, which was surrounded by a cat’s cradle of railway lines.

Stepping out into the night at the end of Roy’s talk, it was possible to sense the ghosts of great embankments and bridges, and the clatter of goods trains in the night, trundling across the arches sixty feet above ground level.

The National Library of Scotland website provides an overlay of historic Ordnance Survey maps against modern satellite imagery: Explore georeferenced maps – Map images – National Library of Scotland (nls.uk). If necessary key the name ‘Awsworth’ into the search panel.

Highfield Cocoa and Coffee House

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Former Highfield Cocoa & Coffee House, London Road, Sheffield

Some significant historic buildings hide in plain sight, unnoticed and at risk of disappearing without much warning.

It’s a recurring theme in my Demolished Sheffield book that a great many attractive and noteworthy structures are off the radar of listing and conservation planning policies, and need the vigilance of local people to ensure they survive.

I’m grateful, therefore, to Robin Hughes for alerting me to the former Highfield Cocoa and Coffee House on London Road, which is subject to a planning application for its demolition and replacement by an incongruous five-storey structure that intrudes on the surrounding streetscape.

I must have driven past the building thousands of times without even noticing it. It’s attractive, dignified but reticent, and its historical significance is invisible.

It was built in 1877 to the designs of one of Sheffield’s foremost architectural practices, M E Hadfield & Son, for one of its most generous philanthropists, Frederick Thorpe Mappin (1821-1910), to provide workmen with a safe, comfortable environment to eat, drink and relax before and after their work.

The cocoa houses were in essence pubs with no alcohol, based on the upper-class gentlemen’s clubs that had grown from the coffee houses of the eighteenth century.

The Highfield Cocoa and Coffee House provided food starting with hot breakfasts from 5.00am, non-intoxicating drinks including a pint mug of coffee for one old penny, “the best tobacco and cigars…at the cheapest rate”, and offered billiards, draughts, dominoes, chess and skittles. Alcohol and gambling were alike strictly prohibited.

The ground floor was occupied by a coffee room, a reading room, a bar and a kitchen. Above, accessible by a “spacious staircase”, was a second reading room “well supplied with papers”, linking by folding doors to the billiard room with three tables.

The Highfield Cocoa House was the first such establishment in Sheffield when it opened on Monday April 9th 1877 in the presence of almost all the major leaders of Sheffield’s public life, including both Sheffield MPs, John Arthur Roebuck (1802-1879) and A J Mundella (1825-1897), and the MP for Scarborough, Sir Harcourt Johnstone (1829-1916), the Mayor of Sheffield, George Bassett (1818-1886), the Master Cutler, Edward Tozer (c1820-1890), and a whole posse of aldermen, clergy and other gentlemen.

Mr Roebuck in his speech remarked that “you will not put down intemperance by being intemperate in trying to force upon the people teetotalism”.

Frederick Thorpe Mappin, before he declared the building open, explained how he and the vicar of St Mary’s Parish Church, Bramall Lane, Rev C E Lamb, had investigated the flourishing cocoa-house movement in Liverpool, Oldham and London to determine the most appropriate model for their scheme.

Within two years the Sheffield Cocoa and Coffee House Company had opened six more cocoa houses with a seventh under construction.

The initial popularity of the Highfield house waned, and it closed on Saturday June 27th 1908. An illustrated cutting, apparently from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, remarked,–

“At the outset the place was a very popular centre – cafés in those days were in the nature of a rarity – but for a long time past the place has worn a somewhat melancholy appearance…“

The building was taken over by a confectioner and a shopfitter and remained in use until at least 2008. The Tramway pub next door was demolished in 2015.

The Hallamshire Historic Buildings’ detailed, informative comment on the 2022-23 planning application to demolish the Cocoa House is here. Nick Roscoe’s illustrated article is here.

Update, April 4th 2023: Vigilant steps by conservation-minded councillors have secured a six-month reprieve for the coffee house: Mappin Coffee House Sheffield: Historic building ‘saved’ from demolition for six months after notice served | The Star. This will safeguard the building – barring accidents – while alternatives to demolition are debated.

However, accidents can happen: Bringing the house down | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

Collegiate School

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Liverpool’s St George’s Hall is prominent in a city rich in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, and the remarkable story of its young architect, Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1814-1847), winning two separate architectural competitions to design it, is well-known. In his short life he designed few buildings, none of which he saw completed.

The only other surviving design by Elmes is the façade of Liverpool Collegiate School on Shaw Street, Everton. Its Perpendicular Gothic style, in contrast with the neoclassical St George’s Hall, indicates that the school was an Anglican foundation.

The building behind is not Elmes’ because of an unseemly dispute with the managing committee who deprived him of the commission in order to employ a cheaper local contractor.

(He had similar trouble over St George’s Hall, when the Corporation commissioned Joseph Franklin, the City Surveyor, to start the project, but Franklin, to his great credit, stood aside in deference to Elmes.)

The foundation stone of the Collegiate School was laid by Lord Stanley (later the 14th Earl of Derby) in October 1840, and the building was opened by W E Gladstone and the Bishop of Chester in 1843.

One of the first Victorian public schools, its original collegiate organisation provided three separate curricula, an upper school offering a classical syllabus for boys aspiring to the “gentlemanly professions” at twenty guineas a term (who were allowed to use the grand Shaw Street entrance), and two further programmes, the middle school at ten guineas and the lower school at three, preparing pupils for business and commercial occupations (and who used the side entrances).

Its original facilities included an art gallery, museum, evening institute and a shooting range.

The octagonal lecture hall was at first the largest covered meeting-place in Liverpool, with a reported capacity of 3,000, and was used for concerts by Jenny Lind and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra before the completion of the Philharmonic Hall in 1849.

The Upper School moved to new premises at Lodge Lane, Sefton Park, in 1884, and the Middle and Lower (or Commercial) schools amalgamated when they were taken over by Liverpool Corporation in 1907.

The Shaw Street school’s alumni included the comedian Ted Ray (1905-1977), the actor Leonard Rossiter (1926-1984) and Holly Johnson (b1960), the lead singer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

The school was reorganised as a comprehensive school for nine hundred boys in 1973, and after closure in 1983 became vandalised and was partly burnt down.

It was refurbished by the architectural practice Shed KM for the developer Urban Splash, and reopened as an apartment block in 2000.

The Shaw Street façade is a fortunate survivor, reminding us that Harvey Lonsdale Elmes was adept at a wide range of styles. His only other surviving work is his Italianate extension to Thingwall Hall, Knotty Ash, c1846-47.

Other buildings by Elmes have been lost – Druids Cross House, Woolton (1847; demolished 1978; Grade-II listed lodge survives), Allerton Tower, Allerton (1849; demolished 1937) and the West Derby County Asylum, Rainhill (1847-51; demolished 1992).

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

Fenchurch Street Station

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Fenchurch Street Station is an anomaly among London rail termini, tucked away down a back street from Fenchurch Street itself , serving only local lines as far out as Southend and Shoeburyness, and lacking any direct link to the Underground.

Its charming façade, designed by George Berkeley (1853-54), looks out on to a modest urban square and the entrance leads by lifts and escalators to four platforms at the level of the viaduct that carries the tracks.

It has a number of historic claims: it stands on a site rich in archaeology of the Roman period; when it opened in 1841 it boasted the first railway station bookstall, pioneered by William Marshall who supplied newspapers wholesale to the Great Western Railway; it’s associated with the first on-train railway murder in July 1864, when Mr Thomas Briggs, aged 70, was robbed and killed on a train from Fenchurch Street to Hackney by Franz Muller, who fled to New York where he was arrested and returned to Britain, found guilty and suffered one of the last public hangings outside Newgate Prison in November 1864.

Fenchurch Street was the first railway terminus to reach within the City of London boundary, followed by Cannon Street (1863-6) serving the area south of the Thames, and Liverpool Street (1874) which became the major terminus for train services to East Anglia and beyond.

Originally built for the 3½-mile-long London & Blackwall Railway, much of which, as far as the West India Docks, was built on a brick viaduct, this isolated line was built to the unusual gauge of 5ft 0½in and neither of its termini admitted steam locomotives: cable-hauled trains ran in by their own momentum and out again aided by a shove from the station staff.

This couldn’t last. When other railways brought their services to Fenchurch Street the intensity of traffic necessitated steam locomotives, and the London & Blackwall was converted to the standard 4ft 8½in gauge in 1849.

After successive amalgamations the lines out of Fenchurch Street were operated by two companies, the Great Eastern Railway and the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway, which was taken over by the Midland Railway in 1912.

It’s always been a busy station, though the lines it served provided uncomfortable services because of overcrowding. Electric trains took over from steam in 1961, but the increasing weight of traffic made the old LT&SR route notorious as the “misery line”.

A major refurbishment, which entirely closed the station for seven weeks in 1994, replaced track, signals and power supply, and a further upgrade took place in 2013.

1970s plans to bring the proposed Fleet Line through Fenchurch Street came to nothing, and the scheme later opened as the Jubilee Line, eventually reaching Stratford in 1999.

Tower Hill Underground Station is a matter of minutes away, as is the Docklands Light Railway Tower Hill Station.

Discussions have taken place to expand Fenchurch Street to six platforms by taking over the site of the DLR Tower Gateway station, running DLR services into an expanded Tower Hill Underground station.

Fenchurch Street was handling around 16 million passengers a day before the pandemic, slightly less than Cannon Street. It remains to be seen how many of those passengers return in the next few years.

Mary Ann Rawson’s legacy

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Upper Wincobank Chapel and Old School House, Sheffield

Mary Ann Rawson (1801-1887) was a celebrated campaigner for the anti-slavery movement, who corresponded with such luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Lord Shaftesbury and William Wilberforce and promoted social reforms of all kinds throughout her long life.

The daughter of a prosperous Sheffield refiner of precious metals and the widow of a Nottingham businessman who died young, she was in an extraordinary position, as a woman in early nineteenth-century England, to work to benefit humanity.

She bought back the family home, Wincobank Hall, which had been sold to cover her father’s business difficulties, and lived there with her sister Emily to the end of her life.

Her philanthropy ranged widely and her views were lifelong and determined. James Montgomery, who had been editor of Sheffield’s radical newspaper, the Sheffield Iris, considered she held “such extreme notions – such extreme views” about total abstinence and the abolition of the death penalty. She was one of the first, in 1839, to sign the teetotal Pledge.

Though she campaigned nationally and internationally, she also did good on her own doorstep, in particular by selling her silverware to found a school for local children in 1841, and she afterwards financed a school house that “would attract a good School Master”. In 1880 she established a Charitable Trust to ensure that the building would continue to benefit the community beyond her lifetime. Her Trust Deed specified that it could be used as a place of worship but must remain undenominational and totally in the control of the congregation.

When the school was superseded by a board school in 1905 the congregation extended it as a chapel, and Mary Ann Rawson’s legacy remains active in making Wincobank a better place. The Grade II-listed Upper Wincobank Undenominational Chapel has services each Sunday and hosts social activities during the week: What’s going on at Upper Wincobank Chapel – Upper Wincobank Undenominational Chapel.

The Chapel trustees, together with members of the Friends of Zion Graveyard, the Friends of Wincobank Hill and local residents are refurbishing the Old School House to provide a community hub and heritage centre, thanks to support from the Veolia Environmental Trust, Sheffield City Council, Sheffield Town Trust, the J G Graves Charitable Trust, the Clothmakers Foundation and South Yorkshire Community Foundation.

Rising costs and increasingly urgent needs, including a warm hub this winter, mean that the working group needs additional funds to complete the scheme.

If you’d like to contribute, please go to https://www.justgiving.com/cmar-wincobank.

The Friends of Zion Graveyard Annual General Meeting takes place at the Upper Wincobank Chapel, Wincobank Avenue, Sheffield, S5 6BB on Monday December 12th 2022 at 7.00pm. It’s open to anyone who has connections with the Wincobank community or is interested in the Chapel, the Graveyard.

Papplewick underground

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Papplewick Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire: Reservoir

Visitors to the celebrated Papplewick Pumping Station in Nottinghamshire are always impressed by the elaborate engine house and the mighty engines in motion.

They tend not to notice that the site is oddly asymmetrical.

The ornate fountain in the centre of the cooling pond is aligned with the 120-foot-high chimney, but the engine house stands to one side.

This is because the original plan for the layout envisaged a second engine house which proved to be unnecessary because the two Boulton & Watt engines and six boilers could meet the maximum demand, lifting water from the Bunter Sandstone 202 feet below ground. A second pair of engines would have depleted the source and simply wasted energy.

Pumping water to ground level was not all the engines did, however.

To understand the full power of Papplewick Pumping Station it’s necessary to book a visit to the Papplewick Reservoir, half a mile away.

The reservoir was built by the engineer Thomas Hawksley in 1880, an impressive vaulted space that could hold 1,500,000 gallons – the amount that the engines could lift from the well each day.

The pumped water was pushed 137 feet higher than the pumping station to a covered brick tank.

When cracks appeared in the brickwork in 1906, probably caused by mining subsidence, the reservoir was emptied and abandoned, and water was sent directly to other reservoirs nearer Nottingham. A replacement reservoir was eventually built in 1957 and serves the modern electric pumps that replaced steam in 1969.

Visiting the Papplewick Reservoir requires forethought. It’s open to the public on steaming days, and access is by a bumpy trailer-ride up the unmade road which follows the line of the water main. To secure a place it’s necessary to arrive soon after opening time: Papplewick pumping station: Industrial museum and unique wedding venue in Nottinghamshire – Visit us.

Exploring this impressive space and admiring the craftsmanship of the brickwork is a memorable experience. It has the sort of echo that might enable you to sing the Pearl Fishers’ Duet as a solo.

Outside, looking over the 1957 reservoir to the chimney of the Victorian pumping station in the distance indicates exactly how far the engines pushed the water that they had already lifted from the well. This is Victorian engineering at its most robust and ingenious, and its construction gave health and longer life to the people of Nottingham.

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