Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Poets and coiners

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Old Church of St Thomas à Becket, viewed from the porch of the new Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Old Church of St Thomas à Becket, viewed from the porch of the new Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Drive up the steep tortuous hill from the A6033 from Hebden Bridge, or better still catch the bus so you can enjoy the view as you climb, to Heptonstall at the top of the hill, where you find yourself in West Yorkshire at the end of the eighteenth century.

There has been a settlement at since before Domesday, straddling the packhorse route, the “causey”, from Lancashire at the point where it drops steeply down to cross the brook at “Hepton Brig”.

This was a place so bleak that farming was at best an uncertain living, and the inhabitants boosted their income with hand-loom weaving.

The rugged gritstone houses with their mullioned windows, clustered round the medieval church, have changed relatively little since canal transport and water-power, followed by steam-power and railways, altered the scale of local industry and moved the centre of population into the Calder valley below.

The last handloom weaver in Heptonstall worked till the end of the nineteenth century and died in 1902.

Heptonstall churchyard contains two churches.  The Old Church, dedicated to St Thomas à Becket, dates from the mid-thirteenth century.  Repeatedly extended, it has two naves as well as two aisles.  John Wesley described it as “the Ugliest Church I know”.  It was damaged by a gale in 1847 and patched up only until its replacement opened in 1854.  Afterwards it was allowed to fall into ruin.

The New Church, dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle, contains the thirteenth-century font, the 1809 clock, and the Royal Arms of King George III from the Old Church.  The New Church was modernised and extended in 1963-4 by a legacy of Mr Abraham Gibson (d 1956).

Buried in the churchyard is David Hartley, ‘King’ of the Cragg Coiners, hanged for “unlawfully stamping and clipping a public coin” on May 1st 1770.

The poet and novelist Sylvia Plath (1937-1963) is buried in the new churchyard.  Her admirers don’t take kindly to the fact that her stone bears the name of her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes.

Another, less well-known poet, Asa Benveniste (1925-1990), who latterly ran a bookshop in Hebden Bridge, is also buried here.  Roy Fuller wryly describes how the locals automatically assume any stranger in the graveyard must be looking for Plath:  http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1520.

The other significant place of worship in Heptonstall is the Octagon Chapel.

Heptonstall is an oddly mordant place, full of Yorkshire ambiguities, best visited on a sunny day.  To find the real warmth, you need to step inside either of the pubs, the White Lion [http://www.whitelionheptonstall.com] or the Cross Inn [http://heptonstall.org/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=26&id=54&Itemid=83] or the Towngate Tea Room & Deli [http://heptonstall.org/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=128&Itemid=102].

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.

Gothic New York: Woolworth Building

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Woolworth Building, New York City

Woolworth Building, New York City

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (1913) in downtown New York, not far from Wall Street, is an unusual creation – a Gothic Revival skyscraper.

This cathedral of commerce was financed solely by the proceeds of the original five-and-dime stores, its entire cost, $13 million, paid for in cash.

Frank W Woolworth’s design brief was for something like the Houses of Parliament but higher than the Metropolitan Life Tower, which is exactly what Cass Gilbert provided.

It reaches sixty storeys, 793 feet, and remained the world’s tallest building until the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930.

It epitomises the technological advances of its period – curtain-wall construction on a load-bearing steel frame and an inevitable reliance on elevators for circulation.  Its three-storey lobby, of gold marble and glass mosaic, is breathtaking, and tinged with an endearing humour:  among the carvings can be found Cass Gilbert holding a model of the building and Frank Woolworth counting out the nickels and dimes that paid for it.

It was sold in 1998 for $126 million to the Witkoff Group:  its tenant is the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

There is a rich collection of illustrations and a brief description of the Woolworth Building at http://www.nyc-architecture.com/SCC/SCC019.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

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

 

Gothic New York: St John the Divine Cathedral

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St John the Divine Cathedral, New York City (1989)

St John the Divine Cathedral, New York City (1989)

The Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York City, is a game of two halves.  It was begun to the Romanesque/Byzantine style designs of Heins & LaFarge, in 1892, and grew so slowly that the rumour circulated it was being built by an old man and his son.  In fact it was nineteen years before the choir and crossing could be consecrated.

The problem of roofing the vault until the central tower could be built was resolved by inserting a Guastavino tile dome (similar to the Registry Building at Ellis Island and the concourse of Grand Central Terminal) at a cost of $8,500:  this temporary expedient, completed in only fifteen weeks, is still in place.  The Guastavino family were also responsible for the vaulting of the whole church, and of the crypt which supports the nave, crossing and choir floors.

Oddly, the Heins & LaFarge design was summarily abandoned in 1909 in favour of a longer French Gothic plan by Ralph Adams Cram, so that the nave and west front are being continued to the designs of his firm, Cram & Ferguson.  The junction between the two is abrupt, and can never be wholly successful.

By the autumn of 1941 the entire length of the nave was complete.  Construction was stopped when the United States entered World War II, and by the time work resumed in 1982 it proved necessary to import stonemasons from England to apprentice unemployed Harlem youths in the traditional skills.

When it’s finally completed, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, centre of the Episcopal archdiocese of New York, will be the largest (but not the longest) Gothic church in the world – 601 feet long, 320 feet wide across the transepts, with a nave vault 124 feet high.

But it can never be an entirely Gothic church without destroying and rebuilding the whole of the east end.

The Cathedral of St John the Divine website is at http://www.stjohndivine.org.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

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

 

Rue Britannia

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Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

The surviving mid-nineteenth century music halls in the UK can almost be counted on one hand – Wilton’s and the Hoxton Hall in London, the Old Malt Cross and the Talbot (latterly Yates’s Wine Lodge and now Slug & Lettuce) in Nottingham, the City Varieties in Leeds and the Britannia in Glasgow.  Sheffield had a couple of surviving examples until the 1990s, and one of them at least was worth saving.

In the second half of the nineteenth century West Bar, which runs along the valley floor below the hill on which the town centre had grown, was what the journalist Steve McClarence described as “the Shaftesbury Avenue of the Sheffield working man”.  Here stood the Surrey Music Hall, which burnt down spectacularly in 1865, the Bijou (which survived as a tacky cinema into the 1930s), the London Apprentice (demolished in the 1970s) and the Gaiety, of which fragments survived until it was demolished c2000 to clear space for the Inner Ring Road.

The Gaiety in its heyday was owned by Louis Metzger, a pork-butcher.  He kept a musical pig called Lucy who, if plied with beer, would sing – as indeed a pig owned by a pork-butcher might.

The Britannia Music Hall on West Bar stood literally next door to the former police- and fire-station that is now the National Emergency Services Museum.  Built on the back-land behind the older Tankard Tavern, it dated from around the mid-1850s, and was superseded by bigger, better and more central variety theatres in the 1890s.

Incredibly, it survived as a bathroom showroom, intact but altered with a floor built across the proscenium and a lift-shaft at the back of the auditorium, and was described in detail by historian Andrew Woodfield in 1978.  When I first encountered it in 1984 it was Pink Champagne, providing wedding goods and, it appeared, a venue for wedding receptions.

In February 1988, by which time it was operating as Harmony Wedding World, Ian McMillan and the late Martyn Wiley broadcast their BBC Radio Sheffield Saturday-morning show from the Britannia and an actor called Stuart Howson (whose great-grandfather had managed the Regent Theatre in the east end of Sheffield) gave the final performance, a couple of verses of a Victorian ballad, ‘The best of the bunch’.

Later the building became Door World and then, just as Sheffield City Council prepared to put a preservation order on it in 1992, it went up in flames and was quickly demolished.

There was much hand-wringing by the Council, the Hallamshire Historic Buildings Society, the Theatres Trust and the site-owners, West Bar Partnership who (in The Stage, April 4th 1992) “expressed regret”.  The fact remains that conservationists have to win every battle, while the developer only has to win one.

The space where the Britannia stood is now used for car sales.

The loss of the Britannia Music Hall is described and illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

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

Theatrical roots

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Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1985)

Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1985)

Wilton’s Music Hall stands in a corner of London that you’d never imagine is steeped in theatrical history.

Beside the railway viaduct from Fenchurch Street Station is the site of the very first London Theatre, built in 1577 and twenty years later surreptitiously dismantled by William Shakespeare’s company to be re-erected as the Globe Theatre on the Southwark side of the river.

In Leman Street stood Goodman’s Fields Theatre, opened in 1729 and closed in 1742, where David Garrick (1717-1779) made his London debut as Richard III in 1740.  In Wellclose Square, the actor John Palmer (c1742-1798) ill-advisedly built the Royalty Theatre (1787) without a licence:  it became the East London Theatre before it burnt down in 1826.

Nearby in Ensign Street there are a series of innocuous-looking Grade II listed bollards inscribed with the monogram RBT.  This commemorates the Royal Brunswick Theatre which collapsed in February 1828, shortly after the opening night.  Charles Dickens’ account of this disaster can be found at http://anengineersaspect.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/collapse-of-brunswick-theatre-february.html.

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

 

The handsomest hall in town

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Wilton's Music Hall, Grace's Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1995)

Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1995)

At the gym I sit on the exercise-bike, retarding the ageing process and idly watching the music-video channel on the flat-screen TV.  Much of the footage is pretentious twaddle, but it’s entertaining to spot the locations used.  Recently I noticed some dramatically lit, high-powered dancing going on around barley-sugar columns that could only be Wilton’s Music Hall, in Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, built in 1858 behind an earlier pub called the Prince of Denmark, otherwise known as the Old Mahogany Bar.

Like many music halls, Wilton’s auditorium was built on back-land behind an existing pub.  Invisible from the street, it was, and is, entered through the pub frontage in a terrace of five houses.  John Wilton intended his spacious hall to be used purely for variety entertainment:  the proscenium is set high above the auditorium floor and there is no wing-space to speak of.

The helical twist ‘barley-sugar’ columns support the balcony of one of the few surviving pub music-halls of the mid-nineteenth century.  Its bombé-fronted balcony is decorated with papier-mâché gilded leaves and flowers.  The original flat floor was gently raked after a serious fire in 1877, yet it was clearly originally intended for patrons to sit at tables to drink, rather than in seated rows to watch.

Like most such halls it closed shortly after the passing of the Metropolis Management Act of 1878, which tightened the licensing requirements for auditoria, and it became a Wesleyan Mission Hall from 1888 to 1956 and then a rag-warehouse.

It was rescued by the Greater London Council ten years later, and a series of restoration schemes gradually brought it back to life.  Richard Attenborough used it as a location in Chaplin (1992) in a scene where Geraldine Chaplin plays her grandmother, Hannah.

Now it is in the care of the Wilton’s Music Hall Trust, with a varied diet of entertainments and a full diary of private bookings, including music-video shoots.  Their website http://www.wiltons.org.uk includes full details of what’s on and an excellent virtual tour.

Update:  The Ancient Monuments Society Newsletter (Autumn 2012) reports that Wilton’s Music Hall has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £1,641,800.

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

 

STEAMed up

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STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon, Wiltshire

STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon, Wiltshire

If you must drive, don’t go to Swindon.  Just don’t go there.  Get someone who already lives there to come out and fetch you.

The place is a nightmare of bad signage and confusing road layouts.  It’s the location of the notorious Magic Roundabout, designed by Frank Blackmore, claimed to be safer than any alternative because drivers are so terrified they go slowly:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon).

The sensible way to reach Swindon is, of course, by train.

Walk from the station to the surviving Railway Village, built in the early years of the Great Western Railway as a company town, New Swindon, alongside the line and the works, away from the original market town, Old Swindon.

The rows of terraced houses, with gardens, are now carefully looked after, unlike the desperately neglected, historically important Mechanics’ Institute (1855;  extended 1892) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/image_galleries/swindon_mechanics_institute_gallery.shtml?1, http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=41501 and http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=3228].

Walking through the subway under the railway tracks into the area that was the great railway works is a poignant experience.  On the other side of the tracks, sturdy stone buildings from the days of Gooch, Dean and Churchward stand alongside modern structures with names such as ‘Heritage Plaza’.  Some of the site is occupied by those great wealth-generators, English Heritage and the National Trust.  Walk through the door of one building and you’re immediately in the midst of John Lewis’ furniture department:  this is the Swindon Designer Outlet [http://www.swindondesigneroutlet.com], which has the GWR locomotive 7918 Hinton Manor as a backdrop to the food court.

Across the way, STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway [http://www.steam-museum.org.uk] is superb, capturing the noise and busy-ness of the great works in a restricted space, and telling its story with breadth and wit.  It’s a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours, with plenty to occupy children and big kids.  I worked the signals and points to let the Royal Train past, because there was too much of a queue to drive an engine.

That said, there’s nothing much to eat inside the Museum, though there is a National Trust café, more department-store than country-house, in Heelis, their headquarters across the way which is named after the author Beatrix Potter, Mrs William Heelis:  [Heelis | National Trust head office | National Trust].

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

Manningham Mills

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Lister's Mill, Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Lister’s Mill, Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Bradford, like Halifax and Sheffield, sits in a spectacular bowl of hills.  When you gaze across Bradford from Undercliffe Cemetery or Peel Park, the structure which dominates the entire cityscape is not the Town Hall or the Cathedral, but the Italianate bulk of Samuel Cunliffe Lister’s Manningham Mills (1873).

Lister, the son of a mill-owner, prospered by three successive inventions – the Lister Comb (1843), which mechanised the last remaining hand-process in the production of woollen cloth and condemned a substantial class of local independent craftsmen to penury, the silk comb (1857-65) which nearly bankrupted him in development but enabled him to turn waste silk into fabric for fashion-wear, and the self-acting dressing-frame, which gave him domination of the velvet trade.

The existing mills designed by Andrews & Pepper were built on the site of an earlier mill which burnt down in 1871.  The Italianate chimney is 225ft high and is said to weigh 8,000 tons.  This vast complex, comprising 16 acres of working floors, employed 11,000 people at its peak, but closed entirely in 1992.

For a decade the building stood empty and vandalised.  The late Jonathan Silver’s proposal to house the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia collection in part of the mill complex fell through.

Eventually, the great rescuer of great buildings in distress, Urban Splash, began to bring Lister’s Mill back to life in 2004.

The initial phase, providing 95 flats and 36 duplex apartments in the Silk Warehouse, sited around a full-height atrium to provide light and circulation-space, is designed by Latham Architects.

The second phase, Velvet Mill, by David Morley replaced the existing roof with glass and steel pods containing two-storey apartments.

The huge grass space to the west of the mill complex was once filled with dense terraced housing.  Two of the streets were named, with blunt Yorkshire gratitude, Patent Street and Silk Street.

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.

Court adjourned

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Old Town Hall, Sheffield

Old Town Hall, Sheffield (2011)

George Eliot remarked, in Middlemarch (chapter 20), that “…the quickest of us walk about well wadded in stupidity”.  It’s astonishing how much we miss while going about our daily business.

When Valerie Bayliss led an intriguing Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group walk around just three streets in the centre of Sheffield earlier this summer, she ended at the Old Town Hall on the corner of Castle Street and Waingate.

This huge building, dating back to 1807-8, was repeatedly extended through the nineteenth century.  After the E W Mountford “new” Town Hall opened in 1897, it became law courts, with a tunnel connection to the Police Offices across the road in Castle Green.  The Old Town Hall, as it’s long been known, ceased to be used as law courts in 1997 and has been practically abandoned ever since.

I – and thousands of other Sheffielders – go past it daily without giving it a second glance.  It has no street presence.  Even the tower clock doesn’t work.

A 2001 plan to turn it into a nightclub and offices came to nothing, and it seems as if the owner has simply walked away from it.

Valerie and her group have kept an eye on it and campaigned to arrest its decay for years now:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/articles/2008/10/20/old_town_hall_feature.shtml]

Now is not a good time to pump money into a dying building.  Yet it’s barely credible that such a huge and important public building has no use, and has had no maintenance for fourteen years.

Future meetings of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group are advertised at South Yorkshire Group Events | Victorian Society.  Guests are welcome.  

Carriage building turned to a fine art

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Fine Art Building, Chicago

Fine Art Building, Chicago

Just as Chester’s central library incorporates a fine example of early automobile architecture, so Chicago’s Fine Art Building is based on the Studebaker Carriage Works of 1884-5.

The five Studebaker brothers started out in the 1850s building wagons for the military, for the California gold rush and for those pioneers’ covered wagon-trains that figured in a landmark 1960s television series.

Gradually they extended their repertoire to more genteel passenger carriages.  Their works was at South Bend, Indiana, and in 1884 they opened their showroom, designed by Solon Spencer Beman, at 410 South Michigan Avenue in central Chicago.  It was designed to receive carriages in kit-form, which were lifted to the upper storeys in small pieces and then assembled floor by floor until they reached the ground-floor showroom where they could be sold and immediately trundled out on to the street.

Chicago’s birth as a cultural centre grew from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, celebrating the quatercentenary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World.  In the afterglow of the World’s Fair, as it’s more commonly known, the Studebaker building, which stands in the same block as the Auditorium Building of 1889-90, was adapted in 1898 as a centre for artists of all kinds, and it continues today as a venue for painters, musicians, dancers and designers – http://www.fineartsbuilding.tv/directory.html.

The adaption included two auditoria, the Studebaker Theater and the smaller Playhouse Theater, both of which were earmarked for restoration some years ago:  http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2008/08/historic-studeb.html.

During the 1898 renovation a series of murals by Martha Baker, Charles Francis Browne, Frederic Clay-Bartlett, Oliver Dennett Grover, Frank X Leyendecker and Bertha Menzler-Peyton were installed on the tenth floor.  Take the ancient lift, and enjoy the sounds of the resident musicians going about their daily work.

The Fine Art Building provides regular events for the public:  see http://www.fineartsbuilding.tv/events.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Windy City:  the architecture of Chicago’ please click here.