Monthly Archives: January 2014

Lady with a mind of her own

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Shibden Hall, West Yorkshire

Shibden Hall, West Yorkshire

Shibden Hall, near Halifax, is one of those black-and-white country houses that was spruced up in the early nineteenth century:  Miss Anne Lister (1791-1840) vigorously modernised the place after she inherited it from her uncle in 1826.

Anne Lister’s remarkable diaries have been edited by Helen Whitbread.  The paperback edition of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (1791-1840) (1988;  Virago 2002) bears the strap-line, “the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history”.

Anne Lister recognised her unequivocal attraction to her own sex at an early age, and determinedly lived her life according to her inclinations, flirting, taking lovers and eventually finding a life partner.

In her voluminous journal she recorded everyday events in what she called “plainhand”;  about a sixth of the four million words are encrypted (her “crypthand”) so that she could write frankly and securely about her emotions and passions for future reflection.

After her unexpected death during a journey to Russia, the diaries remained at Shibden Hall.  Anne’s ultimate heir, John Lister, and his antiquarian friend Arthur Burrell deciphered the crypthand code towards the end of the nineteenth century.

They were so shocked by the content that Burrell proposed to burn the lot.  John Lister, who apparently had secrets of his own to conceal, simply hid them behind the panelling in the Hall.

When Halifax Corporation took over the Shibden estate in 1933, the town clerk enquired about Anne Lister’s diaries and Arthur Burrell delicately suggested “someone…should be, so to speak, armed with a knowledge of what the cipher contains”.  The most suitable person, it was decided, would be the borough librarian.

So the diaries remained under lock and key for decades.  In the 1950s, two female researchers explored the crypthand passages:  one described them as “excruciatingly tedious to the modern mind… and of no historical interest whatsoever”;  the other reticently remarked that the coded content was essential to understanding Anne and her lifestyle.

In an increasingly enlightened social climate, from the 1980s onwards, Helen Whitbread systematically researched Anne’s life and journals and brought them at last to public attention.

Here is a militantly individual landed lady, known to her intimates as “Fred” and to the unfazed locals as “Gentleman Jack”, striving with difficulty and increasing success to be true to her nature.

At one point she contracts a venereal complaint indirectly from her lover’s husband, and takes a surreptitiously acquired prescription to the local pharmacist, Mr Suter.  She enquires if he is ever asked for this particular prescription and he replies, “Yes, very frequently.”

Clearly there was a great deal of private activity in Halifax in the 1820s, as there is everywhere, all the time.  We know a good deal more about it, thanks to Anne Lister and Helen Whitbread, than several generations of Halifax’s male spinsters would have dared reveal.

Anne Lister’s story became more widely known as a result of the BBC television series Gentleman Jack (2019/2022):  Gentleman Jack – BBC iPlayer.

Visitor information about Shibden Hall is at http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/leisure/museums-galleries/shibden-hall/contact.html.

Elizabethan skyscraper: Little Moreton Hall

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Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire: Long Gallery

Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire: Long Gallery

Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire, built in stages from c1450 onwards, epitomises for many the black-and-white timbered architecture of north-west England.  Its curious bay-windows, crowding each other in a corner of the courtyard, and the famous view of its gatehouse, tottering over the moat, make it one of the most memorable Elizabethan manor houses.

The final stage, the long gallery over the gatehouse, is almost certainly an afterthought, probably built in the 1570s by John Moreton.  It defies logic, gravity and time.  Indeed, an architectural model inside the building shows where judiciously hidden modern steel joists hold it rigid.

The Elizabethans were fascinated by height in houses, and many owners built galleries and belvederes so they and their guests could take indoor exercise while admiring the gardens and the distant views from above.

Present-day visitors can still pace back and forth between two plaster reliefs, taken from Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge (1556), reminding them of “The Sp[h]eare of Destinye whose Rule is Knowledge” and, on the other hand, “The Wheele of Fortune whose Rule is Ignorance”.

Not many people realise, though, that Robert Recorde was the Welsh mathematician who first introduced, in his The Whetstone of Witte (1557), the equals sign =.

If you visit Little Moreton Hall you can astonish your companions with that little-known fact as you breeze up and down the long gallery, and if they’re not suitably impressed, add that Robert Recorde also contrived the word “zenzizenzizenzic” to represent the eighth power of a number.

Where would we be without Wikipedia?

Visitor details for Little Moreton Hall are at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/little-moreton-hall.

 

Elizabethan skyscraper: Burton Agnes Hall

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Burton Agnes Hall, East Yorkshire

Burton Agnes Hall, East Yorkshire

I never tire of visiting Burton Agnes Hall in North Yorkshire.  It has so much to offer the visitor.

It’s one of the most beautiful of Jacobean country houses, in warm brick with distinctive round “compass bays”, with extraordinarily fine wood panelling, fireplaces and a magnificent staircase.

The history of the place goes back a long way.

In the grounds, behind a seventeenth-century façade, are the standing remains of the original Norman manor house.

The Jacobean house was built by Sir Henry Boynton after he was appointed to the Council of the North in 1599.

His daughter Anne was attacked nearby and subsequently died of her injuries.  She asked her sisters to make sure that after her death her skull should kept within the house saying that “if my desire be not fulfilled, my spirit shall, if it be permitted, render the house uninhabitable for human beings”.

Initially, her corpse was buried intact in the churchyard, but the supernatural ructions were such that, in consultation with the vicar, the sisters had the grave reopened and the skull brought within, upon which peace was restored.

Subsequent attempts to remove the skull from the premises – in one instance by burying it in the garden – always led to terrifying consequences until eventually the skull was interred within the walls.  Anne, and Burton Agnes, now rest in peace.

Marcus Wickham-Boynton, who owed Burton Agnes Hall between 1947 and 1989, resolved when he inherited to live “quietly, but not too quietly”, and spent his life modernising and beautifying the house and its gardens.

With the Yorkshire architect, Francis Johnson, he brought in panelling and fireplaces from neglected and unwanted houses and restored the long gallery, which had been divided into bedrooms and a store.

Marcus Wickham-Boynton was an astute art collector, bringing to Burton Agnes an impressive array of English and French paintings by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gaugin, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Edward Lear, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Walter Sickert and Maurice Utrillo, alongside two impressive bronze busts by Sir Jacob Epstein.

His heir has added further items that are displayed in the Long Gallery, such as a tapestry by Kaffe Fassett and furniture by John Makepeace including the Millennium collection, ‘Tuscan Obelisk’, ‘Spiral’ and ‘Coppice’.

Visitor information for Burton Agnes Hall is at http://www.burtonagnes.com/Home.html.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Country Houses of North-East Yorkshire tour, with text, photographs, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 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.

Elizabethan skyscraper: Hardwick Hall

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Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire

Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire

You would not mess with Bess of Hardwick.  Her descendant, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, described her as “hideous, dry, parched, narrow minded, but my prudent, amassing, calculating buildress and progenitrix” and Edmund Lodge, an eighteenth-century historian, characterised her as “…a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish, and unfeeling”.

She outlived four husbands, each of whom enriched her.  By her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, she was the direct ancestor of two great dukedoms, Devonshire and Newcastle, and indirectly a third, Portland.

She bought the estate of her yeoman father from her debt-ridden older brother and extended the manor house in which she was born into a splendid hill-top tower-house, Hardwick Old Hall.

No sooner had her fourth and final husband, George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, expired in 1590 than she began work on one of the most adventurous of all Elizabethan houses, Hardwick New Hall, the finest work of the architect Robert Smythson.  She moved into the New Hall in October 1597 and there she died on February 13th 1608.

Built almost entirely from the materials of her extensive estates, exuberantly exhibitionist and famously “more glass than wall”, its most audacious motif is the series of strapwork parapets around the turrets, emblazoned with her initials ES (Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury) and her coronet.

Several of the turrets served as banqueting houses, for the serving of desserts in the open air on summer evenings.

When, in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Capulet urges his guests to stay longer, he tells them, “We have a trifling, foolish banquet toward.”  In the Elizabethan way, he was giving them the menu in a witty conceit.

Hardwick Old Hall is in the care of English Heritage:  http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/hardwick-old-hall.  Hardwick New Hall and the surrounding gardens and park are maintained by the National Trust, who are extremely proud of their new visitor centre:  http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hardwick.  Both buildings are visible from the Derbyshire stretch of the M1 motorway, between junctions 28 and 29.

Elizabethan skyscraper: Barlborough Hall

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Barlborough Hall, Derbyshire

Barlborough Hall, Derbyshire

Barlborough Hall, on the borders of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, is one of a number of country houses which Mark Girouard ascribes to the architect Robert Smythson.

It has all the Smythson trademarks of Wollaton Hall and Hardwick Hall – symmetry, height, lots of glass – and it was built (c1583-4) for Francis Rodes, an ambitious lawyer, staunch Protestant and associate of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, the fourth and last husband of Bess of Hardwick.

It’s ironic that Rodes’ house is now a Catholic prep-school, and Mass is celebrated in his drawing room.

I was very surprised to be told, on a recent guided tour of Barlborough, that there’s a priest’s hole in the building.

Why, I asked, in a Protestant house?

Because, the guide replied, Francis Rodes’ wife was a Catholic.

I’ve not checked this further, but if it’s so it must have been an odd marriage.

Barlborough Hall is a preparatory school and as such is not open to visitors:  http://www.barlboroughhallschool.co.uk/barlboroughhallschool.  However, the Barlborough Heritage Centre [http://www.barlboroughrc.btck.co.uk/BarlboroughHall] welcomes visitors.

 

Elizabethan skyscraper: Wollaton Hall

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Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire

Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire

I once took a friend who was reading for a town-planning degree to see Wollaton Hall, on the outskirts of Nottingham.

I told him it wouldn’t get planning permission now.

The crazy silhouette, high on the hill above the old village, was designed for Sir Francis Willoughby and “built with rare art” by Robert Smythson, the first man in England ever to call himself an architect.

It’s an Elizabethan progidy-house, defying logic and gravity to hoist an enormous prospect-room high above the great hall of a house that in addition had two long galleries.

The Prospect Room is amazing, both from outside and within its empty, extravagant space.  It lacks a fireplace and has only the narrowest of staircases for access.  It can never have been intended for any purpose other than looking down on the surrounding countryside.

Later generations of Willoughbys never seemed to know what to do with it:  at one point it was used as a servants’ dormitory, called – after the custom – “Bedlam”, but the noise disturbed the whole house below.

It seems likely that Sir Francis, part way through the building-period, took it into his head to urge Smythson to build higher.

The ‘Chinese lattice’ joists supporting the Great Hall ceiling would have been adequate to support a lead roof, but have proved too weak to carry the weight of the tower above:  even in the late seventeenth century external buttresses were added at clerestory level to stabilise the structure.

Wollaton Hall is a fascinating, improbable place that has astonished visitors from the day it was built.

Indeed, it’s a wonder it’s still standing.

Wollaton Hall is open to the public, together with the Nottingham Industrial Museum in the adjacent stables:  http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1037.

 

Birmingham’s Catholic Cathedral

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St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham – viewed from the old Snow Hill Station (1977)

St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham – viewed from the old Snow Hill Station (1977)

Birmingham’s Catholic St Chad’s Cathedral was conceived in a white-heat enthusiasm following the Emancipation of Britain’s Catholics in 1829.

It was the first major work of the architect August Welby Northmore Pugin, built 1839-41 for around £20,000.

Pugin himself gave an “ancient German carved oak figure of the Blessed Virgin and Child…said to have been the first image of the Blessed Virgin exposed for public veneration in England since the Reformation”.

John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury gave £1,000 towards the construction-costs and a fifteenth-century brass lectern from Louvain, along with an elaborate set of High Mass vestments.

It was one of the first Pugin churches in which he installed, despite opposition from Cardinal Wiseman, one of the rood screens about which he quickly became notoriously obsessive.

Pugin’s total plan was only fully complete when the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor was constructed to a design by Sebastian Pugin Powell in 1933.

St Chad’s became a cathedral on October 27th 1850.  Edward Ilsley, who had been bishop since 1879, became the first archbishop when the see was elevated in 1911.

During the Birmingham blitz, on November 22nd 1941, an incendiary bomb penetrated the south-aisle roof and burnt a radiator which extinguished it.  This remarkable incident is commemorated in the replacement roof-panel, which is marked “Deo Gratias”.

This romantic North German structure once towered above Birmingham’s Gun Quarter until 1960, when the surrounding buildings including Pugin’s Bishop’s House across Water Street were demolished to make way for a bleak stretch of the inner-ring road.

In 1967 the rood-screen was taken down and transferred to the Anglican church of Holy Trinity, Reading and in the same remodelling the lectern given by Lord Shrewsbury was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of New York for £105,000:  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471867.

St Chad’s is still an awe-inspiring place, but it’s no longer seen as Pugin visualised it.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Pugin and the Gothic Revival’ tour, with text, photographs 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.

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

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

Birmingham’s Anglican Cathedral

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St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham

St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham

The parish church of St Philip was designed by Thomas Archer in 1709 and consecrated in 1715.  It was intended to serve the new northern streets, then called High Town, away from the ancient parish church of St Martin in the Bull Ring.

Archer was an interesting character, brought up in Henley-in-Arden, the son of the MP for Warwick, and as Groom Porter to Queen Anne he effectively held a patent to tax gambling across the nation.

St Philip’s was his first attempt at church-design and he went on to build St John’s, Smith Square, in London (1712-30) and St Paul’s, Deptford (1714-28).

He gave up architectural work when he was appointed Controller of Customs at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1715.  He died in May 1743 worth £100,000, which he bequeathed to his youngest nephew, Henry Archer, MP for Warwick.

As well as knowing the right people to make a lot of money, he was an exceptional designer.  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner & Alexandra Wedgwood point out that St Philip’s was “the first English church since St Paul Covent Garden to be designed by an architect who had seen for himself major Continental buildings”.

Its form is rectangular yet subtly varied and makes lively use of Doric and Corinthian orders.

The tower, which was not completed until 1725, is immediately recognisable by its scrolls and octagonal dome and may have inspired Cuthbert Brodrick’s tower for Leeds Town Hall (1853-8).

Archer’s original plan was to surmount his tower with a large cross, but this was replaced by a boar’s-head weathervane to acknowledge Sir Richard Gough’s influence in obtaining the £600 donation from King George I that enabled the lantern to be finished.

Money talks.

The Victorian architect J A Chatwin (1830-1907) extended the original chancel, adding extra Corinthian columns and a stepped entablature in white and gold to Archer’s square piers and round arches.  Ian Nairn described Chatwin’s work as “grand-slam Classical”.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1838-1898), who was born at Bennett’s Hill a short walk away and had been baptised in the church, designed for the three windows of Chatwin’s apse a triptych of the Nativity, Crucifixion and Ascension in William Morris glass, and subsequently gifted the design for the West Window which represents the Last Judgement.

St Philip’s became the cathedral when the Anglican Diocese was formed in 1905.

Incendiary bombs destroyed the roof in 1941, and the Cathedral was restored in 1947-8 by Philip and Anthony Chatwin, the son and great-nephew of J A Chatwin.

This must be one of the most intimate and welcoming of all the English cathedrals.

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

Electric Palace

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Electric Palace, Harwich, Essex

Electric Palace, Harwich, Essex

The survival of the Electric Palace, Harwich is an example of serendipity approaching the miraculous.

This tiny 308-seat picture house, opened on November 29th 1911, was one of hundreds built across Britain in response to the requirements of the Cinematograph Act (1910), which outlawed travelling picture shows and dangerous conversions of pre-existing premises in order to prevent fires and panic.

Designed by the 26-year-old Harold Ridley Hooper of Ipswich, it was commissioned by the East Anglian showman, Charles Thurston.

Built on a backstreet plot vacated by a recent fire, its most prosperous days were 1914-18, when Harwich was a teeming naval base surrounded by army camps.

Thereafter the Palace struggled against bigger and more modern rivals and an inter-war shift of population away from the docks into new housing in Dovercourt.

When it converted to sound films with The Singing Fool on March 10th 1930 the Palace gained a Western Electric system that was superior to those used at the Regent and the Empire cinemas in Dovercourt.

Though it never fully recovered from the damage caused by the 1953 East Coast Flood, it was the entertainment tax, particularly punitive for a small auditorium, that drove the Palace out of business.

It closed on the night of Saturday November 3rd 1956.  Its lessee, Major Bostock, instructed the manager simply “to lock the door and leave it locked”.

And so it remained, vandalised and stripped of anything of value, colonised by stinking feral cats but still with the tickets in the paybox machine, until it was discovered in 1972 by Gordon Miller, a Kingston Polytechnic lecturer running a field-study programme in Harwich.

He enlisted the support of Mrs Winifred Cooper, chairman of the Harwich Society, and one of his former students, David Atwell, who was then in the midst of writing Cathedrals of the Movies (1980), the first serious textbook about cinema architecture in Britain.

The nascent Harwich Electric Palace Trust gained as its first patron Sir John Betjeman, which no doubt helped things along.

To the fury of Harwich Borough Council, who wanted the site for a car park, Gordon Miller’s campaign got the Palace listed, and with increasingly powerful support and favourable media attention the building was cleaned up, restored and reopened as a cinema on its seventieth anniversary, November 29th 1981.

It was one of the very first cinema-preservation projects in Britain, and it remains a delight to visit:  http://www.electricpalace.com.

The Cinema Theatre Association’s magazine, Picture House No 37 (2012) reproduces Gordon Miller’s extensive survey and historical account of the Palace, written in 1972 to support the application for listing.  It’s a bulky read, but fascinating and copiously illustrated:  http://www.cinema-theatre.org.uk/pichouse.htm.

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

 

Pleasure Beach

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Casino, Pleasure Beach, Blackpool, Lancashire

Casino, Pleasure Beach, Blackpool, Lancashire

Apart from being great fun, the Pleasure Beach has a long, proud history as part of Blackpool’s entertainment culture and as a hugely successful business dedicated, in the words of its former director, Leonard Thomson, to “separating the public from their money as painlessly and pleasurably as possible”.

Leonard Thomson was the son-in-law of one of the co-founders of the Pleasure Beach, William George Bean, who brought an American Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway to Blackpool’s South Shore in 1895 and collaborated with a Yorkshire meat-trader, John W Outhwaite, to import other rides from Coney Island to set up a permanent fairground on what had previously been a gypsy encampment.

Their ambition was to create, in the words of W G Bean, “…an American Style Amusement Park, the fundamental principle of which is to make adults feel like children again and to inspire gaiety of a primarily innocent character”.

In 1906 they contracted for an electricity supply from the Tramways Department, which meant that the rides could operate into the evening, which in turn increased the traffic on the tramway.

When the Corporation widened the Promenade across the site in 1913, Bean and Outhwaite secured an advantageous agreement that no amusement facilities or tram services would be permitted further south for fifteen years.

Their price for varying this agreement when the trams were extended to Starr Gate in 1926 was that all trams made a compulsory stop at the Pleasure Beach, and those trams terminating there showed the destination “Pleasure Beach” rather than “South Shore” – providing free advertising that continues to this day.

When Leonard Thompson died in 1976 his widow Doris became Chairman and their son, Geoffrey Thompson, Managing Director.  Mrs Thompson made a point of testing each new ride as recently as 2002 when, aged 99, she rode the Spin Doctor.

Geoffrey Thompson ran the company until his death at the age of 67 in June 2004:  his mother died, aged 101, shortly after her son’s funeral.

The company is now operated by Geoffrey’s children, Amanda and Nicholas Thompson.

The Pleasure Beach website is at Blackpool Pleasure Beach: UK’s Most ICONic Theme Park.

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.