Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Breakfast in style

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Cliftonville Hotel, Cromer: dining room

Cliftonville Hotel, Cromer: dining room

I’ve stayed twice at the Cliftonville Hotel, Cromer [http://www.cliftonvillehotel.co.uk], so I’ve observed the architecture at close quarters over a full English breakfast.

The dining room is an impressive example of the exuberance of the Norwich architect, George Skipper, but the archaeology of the building is odd.

According to the material I surfed in the local-studies section of Cromer Library, a local retailer, William Churchyard, built a residence designed by A F Scott in 1894 on the site of Skipper’s later extension.  This was a dignified Victorian villa which looks on the only photograph I could find quite different to the existing hotel.

Within a couple of years Churchyard had the elaborate corner building constructed by an unknown architect, and then appears to have demolished the house and replaced it by Skipper’s elaborate wing of 1898, which includes a grand staircase, a ballroom and an elegant dining room with a minstrel’s gallery.  Why would someone knock down a four-year-old house to extend a hotel over the site?

I could find no clear indication of a domestic structure lurking within the shell of Skipper’s 1898 work.  The rooms and floor-levels are entirely logical for a hotel, and I couldn’t discern any odd changes of level or oddly positioned doors and windows.

The spaces are impressive and the surroundings – marble fireplaces, dark woodwork and stained glass – add to the enjoyment of staying there.  And the owners have taken care to preserve the electric-bell boards and the instructions for operating the original lift.

I’m still wondering if the history of the building is even more interesting than it looks.

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.

Young architect in Liverpool

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St George's Hall, Liverpool (1979)

St George’s Hall, Liverpool (1979)

A couple of years ago I showed a group of gifted and talented Wirral school students nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century buildings in Liverpool city-centre as part of a NADFAS North-West Area Young Arts educational event.

I pointed out to these bright teenagers that some of Liverpool’s most remarkable buildings were designed by young architects no more than ten years older than them.

One such was Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1813-1847).  In 1839, aged twenty-five, he won anonymously a competition to design two concert halls, respectively seating 3,000 and 1,000, within one building at an estimated cost of £35,000.

The following year Liverpool Corporation set up a second competition for the design of assize courts on an adjacent site, which Elmes duly entered anonymously and – extraordinarily – won.

He then revised his two designs, combining concert-hall and courts into one building.  The result was St George’s Hall, 490 feet long, with two law-courts at opposite ends of a large rectangular hall, and a circular smaller hall above the public entrance at the apsidal north end.

The Great Hall, 169 feet long and 74 feet wide, is based on the ancient Roman baths at Caracalla, which Elmes could only have known from publications.  Its sides are punctuated by red granite Corinthian columns with bronze-effect plaster capitals, supporting the 600-ton tunnel-vault, constructed to the design of the engineer Robert (later Sir Robert) Rawlinson.

The heating and ventilation system was designed by the same Dr Boswell Reid who drove Sir Charles Barry to distraction in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster:  manually operated by squads of workmen, it represented the first approach to air-conditioning of a major public building in Britain.

Elmes’ design, described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “the best example of Neo-Classical architecture in Europe”, absorbed much of what remained of his short life.  His health, never strong, gave way when the Hall was partially completed.  He left to winter in Jamaica in 1847 and died there aged 34, leaving the completion of the design with Rawlinson, who finished the Great Hall vault in 1849.

In 1851 the Corporation appointed Charles Robert Cockerell to supervise the decoration of the Great Hall and its superb encaustic-tile floor – still to this day in mint condition – by Minton, Hollins & Co.  He also designed the circular Concert Room with its balcony supported by graceful caryatids of hollow plaster.  This magical early-Victorian interior uses the most modern materials of its time – cast iron for the balcony trelliswork, papier mâché for the frieze and pilasters that surround the detached grained deal panelling, plate glass mirrors behind the elaborate Corinthian columns at the back of the stage and a gas-lit cut-glass chandelier, recently restored, by F & C Osler of Birmingham.

Elmes specifically asked that “there will be no organ at the end of the Hall, so that you can stand on the Judge’s Platform in one court, your eye glancing along the ranges of ruddy columns at either side,…[until it] finally rests upon the further Judge’s Throne.”  Instead, in the fashion of the day, Cockerell designed a gigantic case for the vast ‘Father’ Willis organ, which was completed in 1855, the year after the Hall opened.

St George’s Hall is a gem of world architecture – by an architect who if he was alive today would be recently out of college.

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

People with pianos

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Titus Street, Saltaire, West Yorkshire

Titus Street, Saltaire, West Yorkshire

I’ve just finished reading a recently published architectural survey of Sir Titus Salt’s mill town, Saltaire, at Shipley, west of Bradford.

The story is well-known:  Mr Salt, as he then was, chose to remove the family woollen mill from the grossly polluted centre of Bradford to a green-field site in the Aire valley, with ample supplies of clean water, canal and rail connections and space to construct a model village.  The Bradford architects, Henry William Lockwood and William Mawson, built the mill, which opened in 1853, and constructed the village in seven phases up to 1875, the year before Salt’s death.

Believing firmly in temperance, though not himself a teetotaller, Salt declined to provide a public house, saying he saw no reason to spend money on something which would damage his trade.  In Victorian times, other Shipley folk supposedly looked upon Saltaire residents as the sort of people who had pianos in their front parlours.

Saltaire is one of three major British industrial settlements that are designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites – the other two being the Derbyshire Derwent Valley Mills [see Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site] and New Lanark.  Up to the early 1970s all three were unregarded, and piecemeal demolitions threatened their integrity.  At Saltaire the magnificent Wesleyan Methodist Chapel and the Congregational Sunday School came down:  their sites are now occupied, respectively, by an undistinguished modern replacement and a public car park.

The refurbishment of Salt’s Mill after its closure in 1986 was the work of Jonathan Silver (1950-97), who had built up a fortune in retail clothing and successfully invested in a 50% share of Sir Ernest Hall’s landmark redevelopment of the Dean Clough Mill in Halifax.  His offer to develop Bradford’s Manningham Mill as a home for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia textiles collection was turned down by the City Council [see Manningham Mills].  The huge Saltaire mill building is now home to high-tech industry, high-quality shopping and a diner, a café and the 1853 Gallery, showcasing the work of the Bradford-born artist, David Hockney.

Saltaire makes an excellent day out.  Salt’s Mill [http://www.saltsmill.org.uk] is the obvious starting place:  admission is free.  The Victoria Hall & Institute [http://www.victoriahallsaltaire.co.uk] is home to Pam and Phil Fluke’s Reed Organ & Harmonium Museum and what claims to be “Yorkshire’s finest Wurlitzer Cinema Organ”.  Across the river is the Shipley Glen Tramway (though its website http://www.glentramway.co.uk still shows 2009 opening times).

On the edge of Salt’s village is The Old Tramshed restaurant [http://www.theoldtramshedbrasserie.com/images/downloads/newsletter.pdf]:  as the name implies this is a sumptuous conversion of the front end of a former Bradford Corporation tram and, latterly, trolleybus depot, with huge glass windows where the vehicles entered, and the most implausible tramlines in the world outside where the smokers indulge their addiction.

That fills a long day, and probably the evening too.

The new study of Saltaire is Neil Jackson, Jo Lintonbon & Bryony Staples, Saltaire:  the making of a modern town (Spire 2010) [http://www.spirebooks.com/salt.html].

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.

No expense spared 2: Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool

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Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Alongside the three Horsfall churches I mentioned in Liverpool 8 Churches (1), the Toxteth area is studded with fine Victorian places of worship.  Almost next door to St Margaret’s, Princes Road (1868) is the Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue (1871), and across the road the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas (1870).  Round the corner, as Princes Road widens into a leafy dual carriageway where the trams once ran on a reservation, stands the Adult Deaf and Dumb Institute (1886-7) which had an octagonal chapel so that the whole congregation could see the minister’s signing, and further down on the opposite side is the desperately sad wreck of the Welsh Presbyterian Church (1868), apparently the richest and finest of them all, now a largely roofless shell.

Of all the Christian places of worship in Liverpool 8, perhaps the most surprising is the Ullet Road Unitarian Church, designed by Thomas Worthington and his son Percy in two stages, 1896-9 and 1900-1.  Unitarianism is a very individualistic creed, centred on the belief in the single personality of God, which regards Jesus Christ as a prophet rather than a divine person of the Holy Trinity.  It comes as a surprise to the non-Unitarian visitor, then, that the Worthingtons’ church has virtually all the features of an Anglican parish church, pews, pulpit, lectern, choir-stalls and reredos, all in the finest Gothic Revival style using the very best materials.

The place is an opulent essay in Gothic and Art Nouveau, with reliefs and wall paintings by George Moira and Morris & Co stained glass mostly designed by Edward Burne-Jones.  The electroliers that light the nave are original, and tucked away behind the chancel arch are original 1890s electric lamps.

This was a congregation that wielded heavy political clout in nineteenth-century Liverpool:  the previous church in Renshaw Street included among its members the poet and anti-slavery campaigner William Roscoe, William Rathbone V, who was Mayor of Liverpool in 1837-8, his son William Rathbone VI, who was MP for Liverpool from 1868 to 1880 and helped found University College Liverpool and the University College of North Wales, and Robert Durning Holt, the last Mayor and first Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1892-3.

The generation that moved their church out of the city-centre to Sefton Park could command serious money.  Robert Durning Holt’s mother, Mrs George Holt, didn’t like the idea of an interior in bright red Ruabon brick, and paid for it to be faced in dignified Runcorn sandstone.  The cloister and meeting hall were funded by Sir John Brunner, whose chemical company later formed the basis for ICI, and Sir Henry Tate, whose name lives on in the sugar company and the gallery that he gave to the nation.  Sir John Brunner appears in one of Moira’s wall-paintings as the philosopher Aristotle.

To see all these places of worship around Sefton Park would take two days minimum.  Even to see a couple is a forcible reminder that this was a city of huge mercantile wealth a century ago, a place where adherents of every faith sought to assert their presence with the finest architecture of their day.

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

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

No expense spared 1: Liverpool 8 churches

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St Agnes' Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

St Agnes’ Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

A couple of years ago I spent a fascinating four days researching and photographing places of worship in suburban Liverpool, south of the city, to add to my ‘Liverpool’s Heritage’ lecture and study-day for NADFAS [the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies].

I found a whole collection of fabulous Victorian buildings, and met some particularly interesting people in the process.

One group of Anglican churches is the series founded by the Horsfall family over two generations.  Robert Horsfall commissioned the great Gothic Revival architect, George Edmund Street, to build St Margaret’s, Princes Road, in 1868, at least partly because the diocese was vehemently low church, and he wished to promote elaborate, Anglo-Catholic worship.  This magnificent building, sumptuously embellished with wall paintings and stained glass, much of it designed by Maddox & Pearce and Clayton & Bell, is much loved by the local community, but desperately short of funds.

Robert Horsfall may well have been provoked by the statement of his low-church younger brother George’s project to build Christ Church, Linnet Lane (1867-71), not far away.  This church, by William Culshaw and Henry Sumners, has an elaborately sculpted exterior and a much plainer, though costly interior.  Its peculiar gabled aisles are particularly difficult to keep watertight, and the parish apparently struggles financially.

Robert Horsfall’s son, Howard Douglas Horsfall (1856-1936), was responsible for St Agnes’, Ullet Road, opposite Sefton Park.  Designed by the architect of Truro Cathedral, John Loughborough Pearson, this large but outwardly modest brick church has a dramatic interior, like a miniature cathedral, rich in carvings, stained glass and alabaster.  Pearson’s aim, in his own words, was to design “what will bring people soonest to their knees”.

The controversies of the Victorian Church of England are difficult to grasp in an age when Anglicans fall out about female and gay priests and bishops.  The second vicar of St Margaret’s went to jail for contempt of court over a liturgical dispute with the first Bishop of Liverpool, J C Ryle.  There were serious fears that the consecration of St Agnes’ would be interrupted by “some disturbance” following “heated newspaper agitation”.  Within weeks of the opening, the first vicar of St Agnes was in disagreement with Bishop Ryle over “the illegal use of Eucharistic Lights, Wafer-Bread, the Mixed Chalice, the Agnus Dei and the hymn sung during Holy Communion” and waited twelve years before the bishop backed down.

All three of these superb buildings still house congregations, though the days of packed pews and arguments over ritual are long gone.  Rev Robert Gallagher, the former vicar of St Margaret’s, wryly observed, “the capital used for St Margaret’s beginnings came largely from Liverpool merchants’ involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade and down through grandparents’ bank accounts…an irony not lost on a parish that is now the heart of Liverpool’s black community.”

The Ship of Fools’ mystery worshipper describes the “pious gaiety” of St Agnes’ at http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2012/2330.html.

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

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

‘Concrete’ Cockrill

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Winter Garden, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Winter Garden, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Sometimes a man of talent is so attracted to a locality that he invests energy in one place that would otherwise have propelled him to wider fame.  John William Cockrill (1849-1924) left his mark, quite literally, on the neighbouring resorts of Great Yarmouth and Gorleston.  Indeed, Kathryn Ferry’s study of his work is entitled ‘The maker of modern Yarmouth…’.

Borough Surveyor for forty years from 1882, he gained the nickname ‘Concrete’ Cockrill, and seems to have enjoyed being identified with this practical and versatile material:  “The reason for so much concrete work in Yarmouth was, of course, its extraordinary durability and cheapness since sand and shingle were provided free of all cost on the beach in such abundant quantities that thousands of tons have been sent to other towns.”

He laid out promenades at Yarmouth Marine Parade and in Gorleston, and designed the Gorleston Pavilion (1900), together with Yarmouth’s Wellington Gardens, which included an extensive shelter, seating up to seven hundred, and a domed bandstand built of Doulton columns and tiles.

He was responsible for the innovative Wellington Pier Pavilion (1903), using Art Nouveau motifs in a way that prefigured the stripped modernism of inter-war architecture.  It was built around a steel frame, clad in a patented fireproof material called Uralite, a brand-name which Punch thought hilarious.

He also arranged to purchase the Winter Garden from the borough of Torquay, where it had made little profit since its construction in 1878-81, and to re-erect it – without breaking a single pane of glass – in 1904 beside the entrance to the Wellington Pier.

His son, Ralph Scott Cockrill, designed the Yarmouth Hippodrome (1903) and Fastolff House, Regent Street (1908).

When J W Cockrill retired, the Yarmouth Mercury commented,–

If he had set his sails towards other spheres he could have commanded a much more remunerative position but he elected to stay in the place of his birth, because he loved the old town, which he helped to bring up-to-date, and abreast with many seaside resorts.

Cockrill’s unbuilt schemes to turn the wooden jetty into Yarmouth’s third pier show flair and ambition to make even more of the resort:  private enterprise might have made more of his talent, but he chose to remain a public servant in his home town.  Cockrill may not have gained fame or fortune, but he deserves credit in Yarmouth for being the genius of the place.

Kathryn Ferry’s study of J W Cockrill forms a chapter in her collection Powerhouses of provincial architecture, 1837-1914 (Victorian Society 2009), obtainable from http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk.

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.

Village of millionaires

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Methodist Church, Overstrand, Norfolk, designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1898

Methodist Church, Overstrand, Norfolk, designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1898

The writer Clement Scott (1841-1904) first visited Overstrand by accident in 1883, staying with the local miller because there were no vacancies in Cromer.  He was so attracted to the quiet North Norfolk coast that he described it in a series of romanticised articles in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere.  He called it “Poppyland“.

Five years later, when land for development came on the market, Overstrand rapidly attracted some of the richest people in Britain – a small colony of bankers and lawyers, most of them Liberal in politics, cultured and socially extremely well connected.  Part of its appeal was that it was not Cromer, by then regarded as popular, if not exactly vulgar.

At one time there were six millionaires in the village – among them Cyril Flower, Liberal MP and later Lord Battersea, Lord Hillingdon, one of the few Tories in the village, and the financier Sir Edgar Speyer who became chairman of the original London Underground.  Their holiday neighbours included Sir Frederick MacMillan, son of the founder of the publishing empire, Edward Lyttleton, headmaster of Eton, and the classicist Gilbert Murray.

Though these incomers lacked the landed status of earlier generations of Cromer-based bankers, Barings, Gurneys and Hoares, they knew how to spend money and they had taste.  The rising young architect Edwin Lutyens received two domestic commissions in Overstrand, The Pleasaunce (1888) for Cyril Flower and Overstrand Hall (1898-1900) for Lord Hillingdon.  Cyril Flower, as Lord Battersea, provided Lutyens with his only opportunity to build a Methodist chapel (1898).

Celebrated visitors flocked to stay with such opulent hosts.  Queen Alexandra visited the Hillingdons.  Lady Randolph Churchill, often with her sons Winston and Jack, stayed repeatedly with either the Speyers or with the powerful lawyer Sir George Lewis, who lived in the Danish Pavilion, which he’d transported direct from the 1900 Paris International Exhibition.  Sidney and Beatrice Webb stayed with Lord and Lady Battersea, whom they disliked, on a working break with their fellow Fabians, George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas.

The heyday of Poppyland was all over so quickly, killed – as much as anything – by the effect of the First World War.  After 1919 the millionaires moved away and died off, and by the mid-1930s all the major houses had been converted to hotels, nursing homes or apartments.  By that time the only major modern hotel in the village, the Overstrand Hotel, was at risk of sliding over the fast-eroding cliffs:  it eventually burnt down in 1947.

Overstrand remains an attractive and interesting place to visit.  It carries the implicit message that you can’t take it with you.

Boomtown Cromer

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Hotel de Paris, Cromer, Norfolk

Hotel de Paris, Cromer, Norfolk

Until 1877 Cromer was regarded as a “fashionable watering place”.  Its attractions, for those who could afford to stay there, were the cliff scenery, the activities of the fishing trade, and the opportunity to bathe, either in the actual sea using bathing machines, or in bath houses.  Through much of the nineteenth century Cromer remained a very small settlement, and much of the surrounding land remained part of the Cromer Hall estate.

The East Norfolk Railway, first promoted in 1864, opened to North Walsham in 1874, to Gunton two years later, and eventually reached Cromer High Station, a mile away from the town-centre, in 1877.  Ten years later the Eastern & Midlands Railway completed its branch from Melton Constable to the more accessible Cromer Beach Station in 1887.

This provoked a carefully managed expansion of the little town, seeking affluent visitors in small numbers.  A major contributor to this development was the ebullient Norwich architect, George Skipper.  With his brother Frederick, he built the Town Hall (1890), followed by the restrained Grand Hotel (1890-1) on part of the Cromer Hall estate as the flagship development for the western extension of the town.  It was demolished after a fire in April 1969.

A different syndicate employed George Skipper to build the Hotel Metropole (1893-4, demolished 1970s), a more flamboyant design than the Grand, with oriel windows and Skipper’s favourite Flemish gables to enliven the roofline.

Though the Grand and the Metropole have now both gone, Skipper’s Hotel de Paris, built in 1894 for the proprietor, Alex Jarvis, remains in business.  A virtual rebuilding of a more reticent Georgian building that had been a private residence before it became a hotel in 1830, the Hotel de Paris is the prestigious embodiment of its proud name, with an asymmetrically placed entrance surmounted by a landmark domed tower.  Enlivened by Skipper’s favourite material, terra-cotta, it is the most prominent and endearing building in Cromer.

George Skipper’s final work in Cromer was the extension of the Cliftonville Hotel in 1898, providing a grand staircase and an elegant dining room that also remains in hotel use.

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.

The belly of the beast

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Crossness Pumping Stsation, London

Crossness Pumping Station, London

I received some very strange looks on a train recently, reading Paul Dobraszczyk’s Into the Belly of the Beast:  exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Spire 2009).  It’s a perfectly sensible subject, with an entirely respectable cover, but maybe the title is a little over-wrought.

(The last time I got funny looks on a train was years ago when I first read Sue Townsend’s delightful The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ [1982]:  I was rolling around the carriage at the Christmas lunch scene where Adrian is lusting after his aunt’s prison officer girlfriend, and ends up eating the wing of the turkey because he’s too embarrassed to ask for any other part of its anatomy.)

Paul Dobraszczyk’s book is a very interesting addition to the somewhat limited literature about what the Victorians called the “sanitary question”, the great environmental issue of the nineteenth century – how to provide the rapidly growing urban areas with clean drinking water, sewage disposal and a dignified, hygienic way of disposing of the dead.

Dr Dobraszczyk analyses how Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s Metropolitan Main Drainage system, constructed at huge expense and upheaval, initially between 1859 and 1868, is represented by the illustrative material left behind – maps and drawings, photographs and press coverage.

Among the insights he uncovers is the fact that before Bazalgette could begin to lay down a coherent drainage system for London he needed the area to be surveyed systematically.  All the previous maps had stopped at some arbitrary district boundary, and they were all at different scales or levels of detail.

Another revelation is the identity of the architect of the great steam pumping stations which are the glory of London’s industrial archaeology – Crossness (1862-65), Abbey Mills (1865-68) and the less flamboyant sites at Deptford (1859-62) and Pimlico (1870-74).  This was Charles Henry Driver (1832-1900), who also worked for the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, provided architectural detail for the seaside piers at Llandudno (1878) and Southend-on-Sea (1887-90), and collaborated on the Mercado Central [Central Market], Santiago, Chile (1868-70) and the Estação da Luz [Station of Light], São Paulo, Brazil (1897-1900)*.

I was concerned that I’d never encountered Driver’s name before, and began to feel I needed to keep up, until I read a review of Dr Dobraszczyk’s book in the Victorian Society’s magazine, The Victorian, which admits “this reviewer had never heard of Charles Driver”.  The reviewer was Stephen Halliday, whose book The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Sutton 1999) I greatly admire.  If the name is news to Stephen Halliday, then Charles Driver is a real discovery.

*  The Estação da Luz suffered a disastrous fire, in which one firefighter died, in December 2015:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-35157694.

Abbey Mills Pumping Station is a working installation operated by Thames Water and is very rarely accessible to the public.

The pumping stations at Abbey Mills and Crossness feature in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Temples of Sanitation.  For details, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness 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.

Pub with no beer

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Former Ossington Coffee Palace, Newark, Nottinghamshire

Former Ossington Coffee Palace, Newark, Nottinghamshire

The temperance movement is one of the aspects of Victorian social history that has strong resonances in the twenty-first century:  powerful moral interests raged against the perils of the demon drink, while much of the population cheerfully imbibed without actually coming to much harm, in much the same way that current political hysteria about illegal substances conflicts with a widespread and partly respectable black market in drugs, some of which appear to be less risky than legal commodities like alcohol and tobacco.

I’ve been reading some research by Andrew Davison into the history of the temperance movement and the buildings that arose from it.  In many British towns the temperance hall was the most comfortable – and often the only – public meeting-place available for hire other than the upstairs room of a pub.  Temperance billiard halls were common:  Rochdale had six in 1916.

The most startling, to modern eyes, were the coffee palaces, the temperance answer to gin palaces, designed to offer the working man everything he’d find in a pub, but without the temptations of alcohol.

One of the most visible of these is the Ossington Coffee Palace in Newark, Nottinghamshire, designed by Ernest George & Peto and opened in 1882, boasted a ground-floor coffee room instead of a bar, a first-floor assembly room with a reading-room, a library and a club-room and, on the second floor, a billiard room and sleeping accommodation.  There was a tea garden, an American bowling alley and stables for fifty horses.

It is now the Newark branch of the Zizzi restaurant chain and – so they say – haunted:  
http://www.zizzi.co.uk/restaurants/newark.

Its original name is a reminder that it was built, at the considerable cost of over £20,000, as a memorial to John Evelyn Denison, Viscount Ossington (1800-1873), Speaker of the House of Commons from 1857 to 1872, by his widow, Charlotte (1805-1889).

She was the third daughter of the 4th ‘Farmer’ Duke of Portland, and sister of the eccentric 5th ‘Burrowing’ Duke [see More country-house railways and Having a ball at Welbeck Abbey] and his political brothers, Lord George and Lord Henry Bentinck.  Another sister married Lord Howard de Walden.

Denison’s forbears were Leeds wool merchants, but he inherited the Ossington Hall estate, near Newark, in 1820:  he was educated at Eton and Oxford and served as an MP from the age of 23.  His brothers were respectively Archdeacon of Taunton, Bishop of Salisbury and Governor successively of Tasmania, New South Wales and Madras.

John Evelyn Denison was not thought sufficiently grand to court Charlotte.  Her father resisted an engagement until she seriously threatened to elope.  (The story is related in a chapter of Charles J Archard, The Portland Peerage Romance (1907) which can be found at http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/portland1907/portland4.htm.)  They married in 1827, but had no children.

Charlotte, Viscountess Ossington’s bequest to the town of Newark appears not to have been a commercial success.  Which is a pity, because some police officers will tell you that they don’t spend their Saturday nights arresting out-of-control cannabis takers – or coffee drinkers.

Andrew Davison’s essay, ‘”Worthy of the cause”: the buildings of the temperance movement’ appears in Geoff Brandwood (ed), Living, Leisure and the Law:  eight building types in England, 1800-1914 (Spire Books/Victorian Society 2010):  see http://www.spirebooks.com/lll.html.  It supplements Mark Girouard’s account in the first part of chapter 8 of Victorian Pubs (Yale University Press 1984), which is out of print.