Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Security-minded aristocrat

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Peckforton Castle, Cheshire

Peckforton Castle, Cheshire

John, 1st Baron Tollemache (1805-1890) was not a figure to argue with.  Robust, traditional, solid character, full of vigour and strength, he lived life according to his own principles and died at the age of 85 from the effects of driving his trap through wintry weather.

He commissioned Anthony Salvin, one of the most versatile of Victorian architects, to build Peckforton Castle on his 26,000-acre Cheshire estate in the form of a fully equipped Edwardian castle (Edward I, that is,) complete with drawbridge and battlements, on top of a steep hill looking across to the genuinely medieval ruin of Beeston Castle on the adjacent hill.

If any Victorian architect could design a full-size thirteenth-century castle to be habitable by large-as-life nineteenth-century occupants, Salvin could.  Tough, gloomy, irredeemably masculine, the brand-new house had every modern convenience of its day, though some of them were in unlikely places.  All the spaces a Victorian aristocrat would expect in his house were provided, such as a billiard room, a library and a drawing room.  The main staircase is pentagonal.  The floor of the octagonal dining room sits on the central pillar of the annular wine cellar below.  There is also a long gallery, which is technically neither a medieval nor a Victorian feature.

Why did Lord Tollemache insist that his residence should be defensible against a thirteenth-century army?  Its dates are significant – 1845-50.  It seems that the baron, characteristically generous to his own tenants, feared an invasion of the Cheshire plain from the starving workers of the Lancashire cotton towns.  An Edwardian castle, quite as sturdy as Caernarfon or Conwy, could protect not only his family and his household, but also his tenants and, if necessary, their livestock.

The threat was virtually over by the time the place was finished.  But that didn’t make it any less real at the time it was started.

It seems unlikely that anyone other Lord Tollemache himself could have lived in the Castle with enthusiasm.  Descriptions of the house in the twentieth century suggest a plaintive attempt to soften and warm the interiors.  The Tollemache family never returned after the Second World War, and the entire contents were auctioned in 1953.

For years the place struggled to find a use:  it was invaluable as a film set;  at one point it was a venue for live-action role-playing games.  Since the early 1990s it has operated as a hotel.  It’s a particularly spectacular place to get married.

The Peckforton Castle website is at http://www.peckfortoncastle.co.uk.  Beeston Castle is in the care of English Heritage [http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/beeston-castle-and-woodland-park].  It’s a particularly steep climb to the top of the motte.  There is a charge for car parking.

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

 

The man who invented the playground

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Wilderspin National School, Barton-on-Humber

Wilderspin National School, Barton-on-Humber

Samuel Wilderspin (1791-1866) was the pioneer of education for children as young as two.  He recognised that the ages 2-7 were a vital period of child development, and advocated systematic schooling that was active, varied and enjoyable.  He opposed the regimented monitorial system of Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838), in which the younger pupils were taught by older pupils, who in the modern parlance “cascaded” information from the schoolmaster.

Wilderspin developed a classroom-design with a stepped gallery, so that pupils could be taught directly by their teacher, as well as a flat floor with posts around which monitorial groups could gather.

He further encouraged the development of the playground – “the uncovered classroom” – with equipment for structured, active play:  he regarded play as part of learning and development, rather than something children did when they were not learning.

His principles were extended to older age-groups and spread beyond the United Kingdom.

By the time Samuel Wilderspin, with his wife and daughter, came to live in Barton-on-Humber he was already a “household name in his own lifetime”, and he became involved in establishing and designing a National School which opened in 1845.  The brick, neo-Tudor buildings have survived, as has the extensive playground for boys, girls and infants.

There was a period of neglect after the children moved to a modern building in 1978.  This rare survival has restored as a small and evocative museum of childhood and education [http://www.wilderspinschool.org.uk/default.htm].

Reminiscences, for visitors of any age, are powerful within these walls because, as the ladies on reception point out, schooldays are an experience that almost everyone shares in common, regardless of their background and upbringing.

For teachers, who may wonder how four hundred pupils were crammed into these spaces, there’s a reminder that innovation is not new, and a memorial to a man who believed that education must, first and foremost, be enjoyable.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Engine-driving at Kew Bridge

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Kew Bridge Steam Museum

Kew Bridge Steam Museum

The Kew Bridge Steam Museum has been renamed the London Museum of Water & Steam.  I wonder how long it will take people – if they ever do – to stop calling it “Kew Bridge”.

This celebrated treasure-house of steam technology shows stationary pumping engines and other steam-age machinery, live and in action on a regular basis.  Such is the concentration of exhibits that the place runs seven days a week – not simply for periodic steaming days like most out-of-town steam-engine museums.

The pumping station was originally built by the Grand Junction Water Company, whose name disconcertingly advertised that they originally drew their water from the Grand Junction Canal:  after two inlets had proved to be polluted even by early Victorian standards, the Kew Bridge pumping station was built in 1838 to pump water from the supposedly cleaner River Thames to its existing reservoirs.

As demand increased a succession of beam engines were installed on the site, including two of the largest ever built, the 90-inch and 100-inch Cornish engines, and a strange beast that is effectively a beam engine, but with no beam – the Bull engine.

By the time the steam engines were finally decommissioned in 1945 the Metropolitan Water Board, realising that here was a ready-made museum of steam, took the enlightened decision to preserve the site.

The Kew Bridge Steam Museum [http://www.waterandsteam.org.uk] grew from a trust founded in 1973 to enable volunteers to operate the site, and it has become a significant London tourist attraction, easily accessible by rail and providing entertainment as well as education all the year round.

I once took the members of what was then the Guide Dogs Adventure Group to Kew Bridge as part of a ‘Cemeteries and Sewerage’ weekend.  (This was for the people, that is, not the dogs – the engine-house cast-iron floors were not paw-friendly).  You can’t show blind people a beam engine without getting a bit greasy:  they need to sense the height and breadth of the thing and to feel its motion.

One blind teenager in the group asked if he could drive one and, sure enough, he was given the opportunity to grab the levers and make the earth move.  Health-and-safety might prevent this now, but at that time the people at Kew Bridge were able to provide a life-enhancing moment for a guy without sight who wanted the hands-on experience of driving a vast steam engine.

I can’t find the Guide Dogs Adventure Group on the web, but a story that’s founded in its work is at http://www.travistrek.org.uk/scott.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Temples of Sanitation, 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.

Four-legged mutes

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Tomb of George Wombwell, menagerist, Highgate Cemetery, London

Tomb of George Wombwell, menagerist, Highgate Cemetery, London

My favourite monument in Highgate Cemetery [http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/index.php/home] is the tomb of George Wombwell (1777-1850), the proprietor of the greatest travelling menagerie of nineteenth-century Britain, guarded by a statue of Wombwell’s much-loved and docile lion, Nero.

George Wombwell’s career began when he bought two boa constrictors that had accidentally landed at London Docks.  Showing them round London pubs made such a profit that he expanded his collection to fill fifteen showman’s wagons and toured the fairs of Britain.  When animals died he often had them stuffed, arguing that poking a dead animal was an even better experience than seeing a live one.

He was repeatedly invited to show his animals to Queen Victoria’s court.  After one visit he declined a gift from Prince Albert saying, “What can you give a man who has everything?”  On his next visit the Prince Consort presented him with something he hadn’t got, an oak coffin, which he promptly added to his exhibition at an additional admission charge.

There are other animals among the wealth of monuments at Highgate.  A horse with its head bowed adorns the grave of John Atcheler (d 1853), horse-slaughterer to Queen Victoria.  The other named animal that is commemorated on a Highgate tomb is the bull mastiff Lion, who belonged to Tom Sayers (d 1865), the bare-fist boxer.  Lion had been in effect the chief mourner at Sayers’ funeral, sitting alone in the leading carriage wearing a black crêpe collar.  Chris Brooks wrote an interesting account of Tom Sayers’ funeral, which drew larger crowds than the Duke of Wellington’s, in Burying Tom Sayers:  heroism, class and the Victorian cemetery (Victorian Society reprint from Victorian Society Annual 1989).

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, 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.

Exporting pointed architecture

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St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia

St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia

If asked to make a list of what the British Empire exported to the colonies – tangible and intangible items – it’s unlikely that most people would, unprompted, include churches with pointed arches, towers and spires.

Wander around any city in a former British colony and it’s more than likely you’ll encounter a Gothic cathedral.  On my travels I’ve found examples in Hong Kong, Singapore and every Australian city I visited.  In fact, each of the major Australian cities – Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Hobart – has not one but two cathedrals, one each for Anglicans and Roman Catholics.

Stepping inside these churches, even in tropical heat, immediately evokes Englishness, whether the denomination is Anglican or Roman Catholic.  The moment you set foot in the particularly splendid Anglican St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne [http://www.stpaulscathedral.org.au], its stripey polychrome stonework is immediately recognisable as the work of William Butterfield, an English architect who never actually saw the place.

I’m intrigued by the way English ideas of architecture and worship were exported virtually intact to the other side of the world.  Several major Victorian architects had a hand in Australian cathedrals:  William Butterfield provided plans for the Anglican cathedrals in Adelaide and Melbourne, and fell out with the sponsors of both;  George Frederick Bodley designed St David’s Cathedral, Hobart;  at the end of his life, John Loughborough Pearson, builder of Truro Cathedral, designed the Anglican cathedral in Brisbane, though actual construction was overseen by his son, Frank.

Most other Australian cathedrals were designed by English immigrants:  Edmund Blacket (St Andrew’s Cathedral, Perth) was born in Southwark;  Benjamin Backhouse (who built St Stephen’s, Brisbane alongside a chapel by A W N Pugin) was born in Ipswich.  William Wardell, designer of two magnificent Roman Catholic cathedrals (Melbourne and Sydney) was British, a friend of A W N Pugin.

I want to know more about the men and women who envisioned, conceived, constructed and paid for these resolutely European places of worship in places that had hardly seen masonry until their lifetimes.

Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Gothic Down Under:  English architecture in the Antipodes explores the influence of British architects, and British-trained architects, on the design of churches and other buildings in the emerging communities of Australia and New Zealand.  For details, please click here.

 

Having a ball at Welbeck Abbey

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Welbeck Abbey: underground ballroom (1986)

Welbeck Abbey: underground ballroom (1986)

The eccentricities of the “burrowing” fifth Duke of Portland seem endless, and by no means all of the stories are true.  He was distinctive among his contemporaries for providing the very latest conveniences for his guests, even though he rarely entertained, and notoriously kept out of his guests’ way.  One of his most grandiose improvements to Welbeck Abbey was the vast ballroom 154 feet by 64 feet, entirely sunk below ground and top-lit by bull’s-eye domes, well-lit, centrally heated and not at all damp.  On arrival for a ball at Welbeck, guests were conveyed down to the ballroom, still in their carriages, by hydraulic lift to a gently-graded inclined tunnel leading them to the dance-floor.  However, the fifth Duke never gave a ball, and the gas-lit splendour only came into its own when the sixth Duke, a distant cousin who never met his predecessor, inherited in 1870.

The most recent, authoritative and succinct account of the fifth Duke’s life and works is Derek Adlam, Tunnel Vision:  the enigmatic 5th Duke of Portland (Harley Gallery 2013), which contains the full text of Elizabeth Butler’s Account of her life as a laundry maid at Welbeck, 1869-1879 (1931).

Nina Slingsby-Smith’s memoir of her father, George: Memoirs of a Gentleman’s Gentleman (Cape 1984 – out of print but available second-hand on Amazon), wonderfully captures the atmosphere of life above and below stairs at Welbeck in the sixth Duke’s time.  It includes a memorable story of an incident at dinner, when a luckless footman’s humanitarian dilemma nearly lost him his job, until King Edward VII saw the funny side:  the tale is far too good to spoil – seek it out on page 70 onwards.

Guided tours of the State Rooms (but not the underground rooms) are bookable in advance:  http://www.welbeck.co.uk/experience/visit/welbeck-abbey-state-room-tours.

Welbeck Abbey is one of the houses featured in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

 

Finding a secret tunnel: Stoke Rochford Hall

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Stoke Rochford Hall: coal tunnel

Stoke Rochford Hall: coal tunnel

When I first got interested in local history, at the age of sixteen, I and my mates had an obsession with what we believed to be secret tunnels, often attached to Georgian houses in mid-Derbyshire where we lived, only to discover in our maturity that they were in fact land-drains.  Now I’ve found a tunnel under a country house that really has been a secret and is really a tunnel.

I’m particularly glad that Country Houses of Lincolnshire (August 6th-9th 2010) is based in the magnificent surroundings of Harlaxton Manor (Anthony Salvin & William Burn, 1830-7), and whenever I’ve taken groups to Harlaxton I’ve always tried to include Stoke Rochford Hall (William Burn, 1841-5), a fascinating scaled-down version of Harlaxton for an owner who wanted a splendid but manageable Jacobethan house with what were later called all modern conveniences.

Stoke Rochford is even more interesting since the disastrous 2005 fire because English Heritage insisted that almost all of the destroyed Victorian craftsmanship should be meticulously replaced, and the owners, the National Union of Teachers, now have a conference-centre full of brand-new “Victorian” craftsmanship.

When I went to reconnoitre for the 2010 tour Suzi, my guide, casually mentioned a “coal tunnel”, and showed me a virtually intact brick tunnel, complete with iron railway-rails and turntables, to convey coal into the house.

The staff at Harlaxton, now the American campus of the University of Evansville, Indiana, are very proud of their railway-viaduct, with wooden rails, that brought coal and other goods into the attics of the house, and had no idea that the neighbours at Stoke Rochford had in their cellar a similar facility which, it has to be said, is more modest in size but perhaps better preserved.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2010 tour Country Houses of Lincolnshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It contains chapters on Boothby Pagnell Manor House, Ellys Manor House, Belton House, Grimsthorpe Castle, Fulbeck Hall, Fulbeck Manor, Leadenham House, Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall.  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.

The well-kept secret of St Anne’s-on-Sea

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Tram shelter, St Annes-on-Sea

Tram shelter, St Annes-on-Sea

I made a flying visit to St Annes-on-Sea to present my lecture ‘Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of seaside resorts’ to the newly-founded Fylde Decorative & Fine Arts Society a few days ago.  For a society that’s been up and running for less than a year they’ve achieved an enormous amount – over 200 members, an award-winning website, visits to Yorkshire and Krakow, Young Arts sponsorship, a church-recording project and strong connections with other organisations in the region.  They meet at the United Reformed Church, St Georges Road, on the first Wednesday of each month from October to July, and have room for further new members.  See http://www.fyldedfas.org.uk/index.htm.

Kate Cartmell, the Programme Secretary, paid me a warmly-appreciated compliment when she pointed out that my description of Blackpool as a seaside resort “gave the place dignity”.  Sometimes people think I’m joking when I describe the Tower Ballroom as the finest piece of rococo decoration in the North West:  I was heartened that Kate recognised I wasn’t being ironical.

I wish I’d said a little more to place Lytham St Annes into the context of the history of the British seaside.  The Fylde coast tells the whole story, in essence, of how railways and, to a lesser extent, steamships, drove the holiday industry.

The landowner Peter Hesketh Fleetwood gave his name and lost his fortune to the wildly over-ambitious resort of Fleetwood, which was quickly overtaken by the small landowners and businessmen who made Blackpool the premier resort of the North West.

This process was helped by the decision of another landowning family, the Cliftons, to sell up in Blackpool and develop Lytham as a superior, “select” alternative that they could tightly control.  When the Cliftons were in need of cash in the teeth of an agricultural depression, they sold to a developer the land on which St Annes was built from 1875.  Meanwhile, further south, two more landowning families, the Scarisbricks and the Bolds (the latter related by marriage to the Fleetwoods), worked jointly to build spacious, elegant Southport.

To the far north, on the Lune estuary, another miscellaneous collection of landowners threw together Morecambe, in its day phenomenally successful as “Bradford-by-the-sea” and now less a resort than a dormitory for Lancaster.

You can walk round each place and pick up its character very quickly – Fleetwood, St Annes and Southport planned with a ruler and set-square; Morecambe and Blackpool strung together piecemeal;  Lytham, carefully constructed at the gates of the big house, Lytham Hall.

A quick trawl through the new Pevsner (Lancashire North) compels me to return to Lytham St Annes to explore the astonishing quality and variety of its architecture.

Watch this space…

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 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage 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.

Lost Empire in Cleethorpes

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Empire Theatre, Cleethorpes

Empire Theatre, Cleethorpes

The Empire Theatre, Cleethorpes is virtually invisible.  When I checked out the resort to run a visit there I discovered textbook references to its existence but it took a great deal of finding. The building stands on the sea front and attracts visitors as an amusement arcade.  It doesn’t have the obvious decorative faience façade of a Frank Matcham variety theatre, and indeed the only exterior clue to its origin is round the back, where a very tall doorway in the back wall is clearly the scene dock.

When I contacted the owner, Rosie Armitage, she was more than ready to give me access and to allow me to bring groups to see the remains of the interior.  What was the stalls is now unrecognisable, but at balcony level – amidst the paraphernalia of Lazer Quest – the proscenium arch and plasterwork remain largely intact, though painted matt black and only visible under working lights.

It’s a spooky time-warp experience to find a late-1890s interior, as it were frozen in time and virtually forgotten.

The place has its share of theatrical stories. 

Sidney Carlton, the lessee in 1899, was “known as much for his frequent court appearances as for his management of the theatre”, and left town abruptly in August of that year. 

A subsequent proprietor, James Carter-White, a chemist who was also a local councillor and a Freemason, established Cleethorpes’ first independent Masonic lodge in the upper rooms. 

The most illustrious performer to appear at the Empire was Charles Coburn, “the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo”.  

The place was still playing to full houses as late as the 1950s, but abruptly closed after Jimmy James & Co played there in 1960, and has been an amusement arcade now for nearly as long as it was a theatre.

Update:  Since I first posted this article in May 2010, Lazer Quest has gone and there are admirable schemes to reclaim the building.  See About us – The Empire Cleethorpes and Empire Theatre, Cleethorpes, England – shared interest | Facebook.

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

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.