Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

‘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.

 

Possibly the finest fire station in the world

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London Road Fire Station, Manchester

London Road Fire Station, Manchester

At long last a practical proposal has at last been determined to find a new use for London Road Fire Station, Manchester (1901-6).

This was in fact much more than a fire station.  It was originally conceived as a combined fire station, ambulance station, police station, gas-meter testing station, public library and gymnasium, though the last two were omitted to make room for a coroner’s court and a bank.  The Wikipedia entry on the building has a very clear block-diagram showing how these facilities were arranged:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Road_Fire_Station,_Manchester.

Living accommodation was provided for 32 firemen with families and six single firemen;  other facilities included a laundry, billiard-room, gymnasium and a play area for the resident children.  For speedy response, poles were provided and the street doors were electrically powered.  The stables were fitted with rapid harnessing equipment, and there was a forced ventilation-system to prevent the smell of the horses reaching the living quarters.

All this practicality was housed in an elaborately decorated building built in Accrington brick embellished with beige and brown terracotta.  Like its exact contemporary, the Victoria Baths, Chorlton-cum-Medlock (1906), the use of terracotta provided the opportunity for an elaborate celebration of municipal pride, specially cast by Burmantofts of Leeds, with moulded reliefs depicting fire and water and allegorical figures of Courage, Vigilance, Justice and Truth.

The architects were Woodhouse, Willoughby & Potts, though the design shows the influence of the then newly-appointed City Architect, Henry Price, who designed the Victoria Baths, and it’s no surprise to discover that the adjudicator of the architectural competition was Alfred Waterhouse, the leading proponent of terracotta as a building material for grimy industrial cities and also the architect of Manchester Town Hall.

The ambulance service relocated in 1948 and the police left in 1979.  It remained an operational fire station until 1989.  Finally the coroner’s court left the building in 1998.

Since then it has been an increasingly neglected eyesore and planning problem, included in the English Heritage Buildings at Risk list since 2002. Successive proposals to turn it into a hotel have come and gone and its owners, Britannia Hotels (who restored the superb Watts’ Warehouse on Portland Street nearby as long ago as 1982) have used it for storage.  Manchester City Council, understandably, became increasingly impatient that rail travellers’ first view of the city as they leave Piccadilly Station is a huge derelict building with greenery sprouting from its roofline.

Welcome news of a serious redevelopment plan was announced in July 2017:  http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/long-awaited-rebirth-london-road-13396033#ICID=sharebar_twitter.

The Friends of London Road Fire Station MCR have a website at http://www.londonroadfire.org.

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

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 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.

Lutyens in Yorkshire

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Heathcote, Ilkley, North Yorkshire

Heathcote, Ilkley, North Yorkshire

A short distance outside Ilkley town-centre is Heathcote, a dignified, over-scaled villa designed by Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) and constructed 1905-7, which is hugely significant as Lutyens’ first design in the classical style he called “Wrenaissance”, which led directly to such great works as New Delhi and the unbuilt Liverpool Catholic Cathedral.

Lutyens was appalled by the location:  “…an ultra suburban locality over which villas of dreadful kind and many colours wantonly distribute themselves – a pot pourri of Yorkeological details” and he was privately dismissive of his client, a wool merchant called John Thomas Hemmingway.  Lutyens declared that his client hadn’t an ‘h’ to his name, and said that he “could not spend his money – until he met me”.  He was scathing about Mrs Hemmingway – “…does nothing all day and takes turns with the cook to go out…”, the daughter – “…photographs [of her] posing as a professional beauty, but when you see her she is shrimpish – about 4 foot high, full of self-confidence – adored by her admiring parents and her charm takes the form of giggles”, and the son:  “…overnosed and very young and shy…No initiative.  He works hard but…spends no money…”

Quite how Hemmingway came across Lutyens and chose to commission him is unclear.  Lutyens, then an ambitious young architect with a reputation for charm, showed his inner steel by his choice of style and materials:  he later told his colleague, Herbert Baker, “To get domination I had to get a scale greater than the height of my rooms allowed, so unconsciously the San Michele invention repeated itself.  That time-worn Doric order – a lovely thing – I have the cheek to adopt.  You can’t copy it.  To be right you have to take it and design it…”

The result is a massive building of dour Guiseley stone – “a stone without a soul to call its own, as sober as a teetotaller” – with grey Morley stone dressings, lightened by the adventurous use of red pantiles rather than Yorkshire slate on the hipped roofs.  The entrance vestibule is a magnificent space, paved in white marble which is inset – as a nod to the local vernacular – with herringbone brick waxed till it shone.

Heathcote cost J T Hemmingway £17,500, and he didn’t get what he wanted.  Certainly, a demand for storage space gave him exquisite china cupboards with arched glazed doors and teardrop glazing bars;  similarly, in the morning room the built-in bookshelves either side of the fireplace incorporate drop-plan writing desks.

However, one of Lutyens’ assistants, John Brandon Jones, told how on a site-visit Lutyens and Hemmingway viewed the space intended for the black marble staircase.  Hemmingway said, “I don’t want a black marble staircase.  I want an oak staircase”, to which Lutyens replied, “What a pity.”  On a later visit, when Hemmingway was shown the completed black marble staircase, he complained, “I told you I didn’t want a black marble staircase.”  “I know,” the architect replied, “and I said ‘What a pity’, didn’t I?”

Christopher Hussey, Lutyens’ official biographer, commented that this was “the outstanding example of a client thus getting the exact opposite of what he originally wanted, down to the smallest detail, and becoming immensely proud of it”.

 

Taking the waters

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Crown Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Crown Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Selling mineral spring water in times gone by was big business – rather like the present-day trade in bottled water.  The extent of the commercial competitiveness between spa-resorts and indeed within a spa town like Harrogate was vicious.

The Crown Inn, Harrogate, originally built in 1740, made money from its reputation for making bathing convenient and comfortable:  a warm indoor bath with attendance cost 3s 6d, which must have been attractive to those who could afford it, in comparison with the discomforts of the public springs.

In the 1830s an incoming speculator, John Williams, opened the Victoria Baths to provide private bathing facilities.  Joseph Thackwray, proprietor of the Crown Hotel, retaliated by constructing the Montpellier or Crown Baths (1834).  This provoked John Williams to build the Spa Rooms (1835) to exploit the so-called Cheltenham Springs, offering chalybeate water (including the strongest iron-chloride spring in the world) alongside the Old Sulphur Well.

This flurry of competition in commercial bathing led to one of the more famous controversies of Harrogate’s history.  In December 1835 Jonathan Shutt, the proprietor of the Swan Inn, casually discovered that a tenant of Joseph Thackwray was digging a deep well inside his shop on Swan Road.

Shutt hastily consulted the proprietors of the Granby, Dragon, and Queen Hotels and John Williams of the Victoria Baths and Spa Rooms and they concluded that Thackwray was attempting to divert the waters of the Old Sulphur Well to establish a monopoly.  The case eventually came to York Assizes, where Thackwray secured a technical acquittal.

As a result, his rivals joined with the Duchy of Lancaster to promote the Harrogate Improvement Act of 1841, which placed control of public amenities in the town firmly in the hands of twenty-one elected Improvement Commissioners.

Joseph Thackwray could be credited with giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “taking the waters”.

 

Slaughterhouse Gothic 1

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Victoria Building, University of Liverpool

Victoria Building, University of Liverpool

The expression “red-brick university” stems from the great Victorian Liverpool-born Quaker architect, Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), and his love for terra-cotta, glazed moulded brick, with which it is possible to contrive elaborate effects without the great expense of masons and masonry.

The term was actually coined by Liverpool University’s Professor of Hispanic Studies, Edgar Allison Peers (1891-1952) in his polemic, Red Brick University, published under the pseudonym Bruce Truscot in 1943.

Waterhouse is responsible for, among much else, Manchester Town Hall, the Refuge Assurance Building in Manchester that is now the Principal Hotel, the Natural History Museum, South Kensington and a series of unmistakable office-buildings for the Prudential Assurance Company.  His predilection for terra-cotta led his architectural contemporaries sarcastically to label his work “slaughterhouse Gothic”.

His influence on the competition for the Victoria Law Courts, Birmingham, which were eventually built by Aston Webb & Ingress Bell, undoubtedly encouraged Birmingham to become “terracotta city” in the Edwardian period.

In his native Liverpool, Waterhouse built (in stone) the former North Western Hotel in front of Lime Street Station, and the iconic Victoria Building of Liverpool University (1892).  This was conceived as part of an 1880s federation of University College, Liverpool, Owens College in Manchester and the Yorkshire College in Leeds, which split up when first Liverpool and then Leeds gained independent university status in 1903 and 1904.

Many of the architectural interesting parts of the Victoria Building are now open to the public as the Victoria Gallery & Museum, and the interior is an eye-opening.  Rather than the lavatorial reds that one might expect, Waterhouse used an interesting palette of buff and pale green faience.  Staircases weave through the building, supplemented by an ingeniously inserted modern lift.  The Tate Hall, formerly the library funded by the great sugar baron, has a spectacular timber roof.

It’s well worth a visit.  Admission is free.  The displays feature aspects of the University’s work since its foundation in 1887.  And it’s a welcome addition to Liverpool’s superb range of places to have morning coffee or afternoon tea. See http://www.liv.ac.uk/vgm.

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.

Exploring Australia 11: Rippon Lea Mansion

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Rippon Lea Mansion, Melbourne, Australia: fernery

Rippon Lea Mansion, Melbourne, Australia: fernery

Because I was in Melbourne on my own, I chose to avoid the obvious tourist sites that I might visit with other people, and sought out the quirky places where I wouldn’t dream of taking folk who don’t share my interests.

I spent half an hour photographing the late nineteenth-century housing around Albert Park, with characteristic filigree cast-iron lace verandas manufactured, so I’m told, from the ballast and scrap of ships that ended their days in Melbourne harbour.

I spent an hour in the Melbourne General Cemetery, a hot and unshady place, where the Necropolis Company has clearly done a roaring trade in narrowing the paths, so that ranks of ostentatious Italian black-marble family tombs stand in front of older, more English monuments, and there is, near the modern funeral chapel, an astonishing grotto in memory of Elvis Presley, inaugurated barely three months after the singer’s death in August 1977.

Most enjoyable of all, and prompted by Gabriel, the Victorian aficionado I met on The Ghan, I visited a Victorian Victorian mansion, Rippon Lea, in the southern suburbs [http://www.ripponleaestate.com.au].  (It’s disconcerting to English ears that in this part of the world Victorian means located in the state of Victoria.)  If I’d remembered to take my UK National Trust card I could have saved A$12 [about £7.50], but I could hardly begrudge such a delightful Australian National Trust experience, complete with a pot of properly-made tea at the end of the afternoon.

Rippon Lea was the creation of a Melbourne clothing and drapery merchant, Frederick Thomas Sargood, inspired by his English parents’ retirement villa in Croydon, South London.  Designed by the Melbourne architect Joseph Reed, who favoured polychrome brickwork, Rippon Lea was begun in 1868 and repeatedly extended as Sargood’s family grew.  In style it veers between French and Italian, and is graced with ironwork verandas, including a particularly fine porte-cochère.

The glory of the place is the garden, landscaped, irrigated and drained from unpromising sandy wasteland, with sewage disposal integrated into the provision of fertiliser:  the Australian National Trust aim to restore it to full water-supply self-sufficiency.  The most beguiling feature is the gigantic iron-framed fernery, built to protect and conserve specimens gathered world-wide.

After Sargood’s death in 1903, the property was bought by the appropriately named Sir Thomas Bent, described by another Prime Minster of Victoria as “the most brazen, untrustworthy intriguer” ever to sit in the Victorian Parliament.  Bent proceeded to parcel up the Rippon Lea estate for housing development, and used the house only as a venue for political gatherings.

Bent died in 1910, before his syndicate could sell off the entire property, and Rippon Lea was then bought and lived in by a furniture dealer, Benjamin Nathan.  When his daughter Louisa inherited in 1935, she chose to cheer the place up, overpainting the gold-embossed wallpaper and marble columns and fireplaces, adding mirrors to gain light and demolishing Sargood’s iron-framed ballroom.  She created a new ballroom which opens on to a Hollywood-style swimming pool and terrace in 1938-9.  After a considerable controversy over an intended government-backed compulsory purchase, it became a National Trust property on Louisa’s death in 1972.

As displayed, the house is a palimpsest, based on English models, adapted to the sunny Melbourne climate, designed and built to the highest standards of its day, and then forcefully modernised for a 1930s lifestyle.  Pam, our guide, discussed at length how much is still being discovered about the house and its contents.  Australian history is, as the taxi-driver told me on the way to Alice Springs airport, short but “busy”.