Monthly Archives: January 2014

High society

Tuscan Temple, Duncombe Terrace, North Yorkshire

You can spend an enjoyable day in North Yorkshire pretending to be an eighteenth-century aristocrat lording it over the landscape.

Visit (in either order) Duncombe Park [http://www.duncombepark.com/the_garden.shtml] and Rievaulx Terrace [http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/rievaulx-terrace].

In the grounds of Duncombe Park, stretching along Ryedale towards Rievaulx Abbey, are a series of artificial high-level terraces.

Duncombe Terrace is significant because it’s one of the first such features to ignore formal geometry and follow the contour.

It’s punctuated by two temples dating from around 1730, an Ionic rotunda which closely resembles Vanburgh’s Rotondo at Stowe (1721), and a circular Tuscan temple.

The terraces at Rievaulx are rather later, dating from about 1758. The pattern is the same, with a temple at either end, and the Rievaulx temples follow the same classical orders as their companions at Duncombe, but in this case a circular Doric Temple is paired with a rectangular Ionic Temple.

Both are spectacularly expensive ways of giving guests somewhere to stroll, and apart from the landmark temples, each provides dramatic vistas: the Duncombe terrace looks across to Helmsley Castle, while the walk at Rievaulx provides a whole series of views, cut through the trees, to the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in the valley below.

The two sets of terraces are some three miles apart, and it’s probable that they were meant to connect by means of a scenic ride. Large worked stones found in the intervening river-bed could have been the basis for a viaduct.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s comment [The Buildings of England: Yorkshire: The North Riding (Penguin 1966)] on Rievaulx Terrace sums up the breathtaking assurance of the eighteenth-century handling of natural and man-made beauty:

The whole composition…is a superlative example of large-scale landscape gardening and of that unquestioning sense of being on top of the world which the rich and the noble in England possessed throughout the Georgian period.

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.

Country house survivor

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Duncombe Park, North Yorkshire

After decades of talk of “the destruction of the English country house” it’s refreshing to find more and more houses that were given over to institutional use have been restored as homes in the past twenty years.

One such is Duncombe Park House, North Yorkshire, (1713) designed by the gentleman-architect William Wakefield, possibly with assistance from Sir John Vanburgh, who was at the time coming to the end of his work at Castle Howard.

It’s a house that has survived a succession of crises.

All but the shell of Duncombe Park was destroyed by fire on a snowy night, January 11th 1879. The parish magazine describes how the maids woke to the sounds of crackling and extremely hot carpets. The water-supply to the house had been turned off to prevent frozen pipes, so the main block burnt to a shell although all of the family, guests and servants and – after desperate efforts – many of the contents were saved.

Work on rebuilding the main house stopped when the heir, Viscount Helmsley, died unexpectedly in 1881, leaving a two-year-old son to inherit from his grandfather, the 1st Earl of Feversham.

When rebuilding resumed in 1891, the architect William Young based his plans on the original design and some surviving fabric, but with an additional bay projecting the east front further into the garden. He also made the original round-headed windows square, and reduced the interior size of the entrance hall, converting the design of its plaster ceiling from an oblong to a forty-foot square.

In 1894 a further fire destroyed furniture, tapestries and £6,000-worth of jewellery that had escaped the 1879 fire. The damage was quickly restored, with the addition of a chapel by Temple Moore, in 1895.

When the second earl, grandson of the first, was killed in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, a year after inheriting the title, his son took the title at the age of ten, inheriting an estate encumbered with two sets of death duties in rapid succession.

Duncombe Park House was let to the Woodard Foundation and opened as Queen Mary’s Girls’ School in 1926. The third earl throughout his life lived at Nawton Tower elsewhere on the estate.

At his death in 1963 the earldom died out but the older barony passed to his fourth cousin, the 6th Lord Feversham, at the age of eighteen. It now belongs to his son, the 7th Lord.

The school’s lease did not cover repairs, and Lord Feversham was not prepared to allow modern buildings to be added, so when a break-lease fell due in 1986 Lord and Lady Feversham chose to reclaim the house, and the school removed to Baldersby Park near Thirsk – another fine early-eighteenth century house, though much altered, by Colen Campbell.

The restoration of Duncombe Park was carried out by Martin Stancliffe to such a standard that it’s difficult to visualise that the place was for sixty years a thriving, though apparently well-disciplined boarding school.

It’s a shame that it’s no longer possible for the general public to tour the house at Duncombe Park, though the gardens remain open: http://www.duncombepark.com/index.php.

Coventry’s boutique quarter

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Spon Lane, Coventry, West Midlands

Wikipedia has a main-page feature that asks annoying “Did you know?” questions that are so specialised you’re supposed to click on the article to find out something or nothing.

Once the question was “Did you know… that Spon Street survived the air raid that obliterated much of Coventry City Centre and is now a Conservation Area?” Well, actually I did, for once.

Spon Street is now “Coventry’s hidden treasure” – “a unique selection of quality and niche shops… occupying a range of historic renovated medieval buildings”: http://www.sponstreetcoventry.co.uk.

It’s also a conservation tragic-comedy.

In the early twentieth century Coventry, according to its historian, Mary Dormer Harris, had so much genuine medieval architecture it could have been the “English Nuremburg”; J B Priestley in his English Journey (1934) commented, “you peep round a corner and see half-timbered and gabled houses that would do for the second act of the Meistersinger”.

After the Luftwaffe devastated the centre of the city in November 1940, the City Architect, Donald Gibson (1908-1991), set about destroying much of what the Germans left.

He grasped the opportunity to give the people of Coventry a splendid new city centre, spacious, clean, modern and new, aligned on an axis with the tower of the bombed Cathedral, with duplex shopping arcades based on – of all things – Chester’s Rows.

Meanwhile, a Worcester architect, F W B (Freddie) Charles (1912-2002) took a contrary approach.

He was the architect of Shrewsbury’s fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Bear Steps and a founder of the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings: http://www.avoncroft.org.uk.

In Coventry he transplanted timber-framed buildings from elsewhere to join surviving structures on Spon Street, a former road into the centre severed by the inner ring-road.

7-10 Much Park Street became 163-4 Spon Street in 1970-4; 142-3 Spon Street was restored on a different-shaped site as 16 Spon Street in 1972-5; the former Green Dragon Inn at 122-123 Much Park Street became 20-21 Spon Street after partial collapse between 1972 and 1982. 159-162 and 167-168 Spon Street were restored in situ, with new “medieval” facades in 1981-5.

So it was that some fragments of Coventry’s wealth of medieval buildings that existed in 1900 and survived 1940 were – literally – sent to Coventry.

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

Exploring Melbourne: St Patrick’s Cathedral

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St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia

As Australian cities grew up in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Anglicans in each place set about building their cathedral but were often trumped by the Catholics, who were mostly poor Irish settlers escaping the penury and famine of their native land.

Catholic cathedrals in Australia usually stand on top of a hill, and are richly ornate. Their builders – congregations, priests and architects – went out of their way to state that only the best was good enough for God.

In Melbourne, the Anglican Cathedral, St Paul’s, is particularly fine, yet the Catholic Cathedral, St Patrick’s, is magnificent. Its spire, 344 feet high, is the highest in Australia.

The architect of St Patrick’s Cathedral was William Wilkinson Wardell (1823-1899), a London-born convert to Catholicism, trained by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

The cathedral was begun in 1858 and consecrated in 1897: William Wardell was one of the few architects of Gothic cathedrals to see his design substantially completed in his lifetime, though the spires were added in 1939 by Archbishop Daniel Mannix, the politically powerful Irish-Australian who held the see from 1917 until his death at the age of 99 in 1963.

Mannix’s statue by Nigel Boonham (1997) stands outside Wardell’s cathedral, gazing across to Parliament House, symbolising the lengthy struggle to overcome the early disdain towards Irish and Catholic settlers in Australia.

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.

Exploring Melbourne: Coop’s Shot Tower

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Coop’s Shot Tower, Melbourne Central shopping centre, Melbourne, Australia’

Apart from eating and drinking my way round Melbourne with Gabe and Dave [Eat your way round St Kilda, Eat your way round central Melbourne and Exploring Melbourne: Madame Brussels] I’d come to the city to work. This was the starting point for my lecture tour with the Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Societies [ADFAS: http://www.adfas.org.au], and as soon as I met my Melbourne host Christine Penfold I knew I was in good hands.

Christine brought to my hotel not only a fat folder of air-, train- and bus-tickets, but also a beautiful bowl of fruit to sustain me. This told me that I was being looked after, as I had been with the New Zealand Decorative & Fine Art Societies, by warm-hearted, civilised people with imagination and a flair for enjoying life.

ADFAS put me up at the Mercure, Spring Gardens [http://www.accorhotels.com/gb/hotel-2086-mercure-melbourne-treasury-gardens/index.shtml] which meant that when I wasn’t needed for their programme I could find everything I wanted on the doorstep – food and wi-fi at the Spaghetti Tree [http://www.spaghettitree.com.au] and a memorable independent bookshop: http://www.hillofcontentbookshop.com.

The one tourist site I fitted in within my work-schedule was the 165-feet-high Coops Shot Tower (1889) [http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building543_coops-shot-tower.html] spectacularly enclosed in the dome of the Melbourne Central shopping-centre, built in 1991.

Built to manufacture lead shot by dropping molten lead through a copper sieve, it’s not even the tallest shot-tower in Melbourne: the sister Clifton Hill Shot Tower of 1885, [http://vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/vhd/heritagevic#detail_places;295] built by the same Coops family, stands 263 feet high.

I’d never paid any attention to shot towers in the UK, though I knew there was one in Derby that was demolished in 1931-2 to make way for the bus station.

There are remaining examples in Chester (1799) [http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/details/default.aspx?id=205292], Twickenham (late 18th-/early 19th-century) [http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-205292-shot-tower-twickenham] and Bristol (1968) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shot.tower.bristol.arp.jpg].

Exploring Melbourne: Boroondara Cemetery

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Springthorpe Monument, Booroondara Cemetery, Kew, Melbourne, Australia

Quite the most astonishing Victorian edifice that Gabe showed me on our trip round suburban Melbourne was the Springthorpe Monument in Boooondara Cemetery, in Kew not far from Villa Alba.

Dr John Springthorpe (1855-1933) erected this tomb in memory of his wife Annie, who died giving birth to their fourth child in 1897 at the age of thirty. The power of his grief led him to commemorate her in a rich, intense, uplifting memorial. It cost around A£10,000 – ten times what he spent on his three-storey house and surgery in Collins Street in the city-centre.

Within a massive Greek temple twenty feet square, designed by the architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear (1865-1933), lies an exquisite Carrara marble group by the sculptor Bertram Mackennal (1863-1931) showing the deceased with two angels, one placing a now-lost wreath on her head, the other playing a lyre.

Both these artists were Melbourne natives, though Bertram Mackennal gained prestige for his work in England as well as Australia: his is the relief of King George V that appeared on British and Empire coinage, medals and postage stamps. He was also responsible for the tomb of George and Mary Curzon at Kedleston in Derbyshire.

The crowning architectural glory – literally – of this monument is the dome of deep red Tiffany glass, which bathes the statuary in a warm light that is the opposite of funereal.

The tomb is inscribed with a plethora of quotations from the Bible, the classics and from nineteenth-century poetry. The one omission is Annie Springthorpe’s name. Instead there is a simple, poignant inscription:

My own true love
Pattern daughter perfect mother and ideal wife
Born on the 26th day of January 1867
Married on the 26th day of January 1887
Buried on the 26th day of January 1897

Professor Pat Jalland, an Australian academic best known in the UK for her fascinating book Death in the Victorian Family (OUP 1996), wrote about the Springthorpe monument in The Age in 2002: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004752838.html, and there is further detail in George Nipper’s contribution to http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=708&start=6.

Further illustrations can be found at http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=708.

There is a biography of Dr John Springthorpe at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/springthorpe-john-william-8610.

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

Exploring Melbourne: Villa Alba

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Villa Alba, Kew, Melbourne, Australia

My Melbourne friend Gabe and I share an enjoyment of Victorian architecture and photography. For Gabe, of course, as a Melbourne resident, the adjective “Victorian” has both a historical and a geographical sense. So Gabe and I spent an afternoon looking at Victorian Victorian architecture.

Without him I wouldn’t have found Villa Alba in the suburb of Kew, the home of William Greenlaw, a Scottish farmer’s son who rose to be general manager of the Colonial Bank of Australasia and in 1883-4 kitted out his wife Anna Maria in opulent splendour overlooking the Yarra River.

He may have designed the structure himself, but he employed the brothers Charles Stewart Paterson (1843-1917) and James Paterson (1853-1929), also Scots, to provide elaborate painted and stencilled colour schemes throughout the house. Each room had its own theme, with much use of trompe l’oeil including outdoor scenes of Edinburgh and Sydney, Mr & Mrs Greenlaw’s respective birthplaces, scenes from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and, in the boudoir, a tented ceiling.

The furniture by W H Rocke & Co has largely disappeared, and one satinwood cabinet is in the National Gallery of Victoria. A satinwood overmantel, illustrating scenes from Romeo & Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been returned to the house.

When William Greenlaw met the fate of over-confident bankers and was made insolvent in the early 1890s, his home was safely in his wife’s name. Two years after his death in 1893, she sold up and let the place, and in due course it became a nurse’s home and then a college. At some point in the 1950s, much of the Pattersons’ decoration was overpainted to “brighten the place up”.

The Villa Alba Museum Inc bought the house and garden in 2004, and is now slowly and surely recovering the lost decorative schemes. It’s fascinating to see the place in transition, and in time to come it’ll look as glorious as it did in 1884.

For details of the restoration see http://www.villaalbamuseum.org. A more detailed historical description, which first appeared in Antiques & Collectables for Pleasure & Profit (Spring 2011), is at http://www.acpp.com.au/article03_antiques-collectables.php. The house is illustrated in glorious detail in Russell Winnell’s photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/65998556@N03.

Fab Four

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: Fab Four event, April 13th 2012 – from left to right, 4464 Bittern, 4468 Mallard, 60103 Flying Scotsman, 4771 Green Arrow

My friend Doug, who likes trains nearly as much as he likes buses, tipped me off that the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event would be good value.

The original intention behind the title, apparently, was to reunite for the first time in preservation examples of the LNER A1, A2, A3 and A4 locomotive classes.

I had to look this up, having discarded my Ian Allan spotting books many years ago.

The A1 Pacific locomotives were all scrapped in the early 1960s, and a brand-new version, 60163 Tornado, has been painstakingly constructed.

The A2 was an updated version of the A1. Its sole survivor is a household name, 60532 Blue Peter, which looks magnificent and only needs half a million pounds spending on its next overhaul.

The only surviving A3 is an even more familiar household name, 60103 Flying Scotsman, saved by the late Alan Pegler, doyen of railway enthusiasts. (His obituary in The Times, March 23rd 2012, relates a life well lived: “When the good Lord calls me to the happy shunting yard in the sky, I shall have no regrets,” he told the Railway Magazine. “I’ve had a great innings.”)

The Fab Four plan came adrift because Flying Scotsman, nearing the end of its latest overhaul, was indisposed, so the Barrow Hill people and their sponsors, Railway Magazine, fielded two examples of the instantly familiar streamlined A4 class, LNER 4464 Bittern, which is in full working order, and the record-breaking 4468 Mallard, which is apparently regarded as so precious a piece of history that it hasn’t steamed since the 1980s.

It was a tremendous show, and drew hordes of visitors, including hard-core railway photographers who carry not only dauntingly huge cameras but also stepladders, like paparazzi.

The implicit thematic intention was to show locomotives that hauled the East Coast main line expresses between London and Edinburgh and beyond.

In addition to the Fab Four, there were other locomotives with an East Coast Route connection.

Great Northern 251, dating from 1902, spun on its own axis on the roundhouse turntable. LNER 4771 Green Arrow, a variant version of Sir Nigel Gresley’s Pacifics, lined up with the Fab Four. 61994 The Great Marquess, a more rugged beast designed for yomping across the Scottish Highlands, pulled trains up and down the Barrow Hill demonstration track.

Barrow Hill is also the home base of the Deltic Preservation Society, which maintains in running order a roster of three of the diesel successors to the steam-powered Fab Four.

It was a fine display, beautifully organised. I warmed to the fact that every Barrow Hill volunteer I spoke to wished me an enjoyable day. They may have been scripted but they clearly meant it. I admired the fact that the carriages hauled by The Great Marquess were immaculately turned out in British Railways maroon on the side that the public sees; the other side is still in the Rail Blue livery that they brought from mainline service.

I had only one complaint about the whole experience. The advertised advance-ticket prices were fictional. It was practically impossible to buy a ticket in advance without paying a “transaction fee” of £1.00.

I don’t at all mind paying £15.00 rather than £14.00 for an entertainment. But I do expect to pay the price on the price-tag. Compulsory add-ons simply make me feel ripped off.

There’s no need for it. It would have cost the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and the Ticket Factory nothing at all to come clean and say the cost is £1 more than they pretended.

To do otherwise leaves a nasty taste.

Round house on the Old Road

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire

To this day, when trains north from Chesterfield turn right towards Barrow Hill and Beighton, rather than take the direct route via Dronfield into Sheffield, railway staff call it the “Old Road”, because it’s the line of the North Midland Railway which opened in 1840. The newer route was opened thirty years later, so has now been new for nearly 150 years.

At the same time that the Midland Railway opened its direct route north into Sheffield, the Barrow Hill locomotive shed was constructed. It has survived to become a unique piece of railway archaeology – the only surviving operational roundhouse locomotive depot in the UK.

There are other British roundhouses, of course: the Roundhouse at Camden Town, in north London is now a celebrated arts venue [Visiting the Roundhouse | Roundhouse], the Derby Roundhouse is a multipurpose conference venue [Derby Roundhouse | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] and the main hall of the National Railway Museum is built around one of the two turntables of the former York North motive-power depot in Britain.

But only at Barrow Hill can you sense, smell, almost taste the atmosphere of coal and oil and grime that characterised the age of the steam locomotive.

And there, within the roundhouse itself and in the surrounding buildings, the graft of maintaining steam and diesel locomotives continues, thanks to the vision of a group of enthusiasts who realised that when the place closed to operational use by British Rail in 1991 an important piece of railway heritage was in danger.

The Barrow Hill roundhouse is home to a variety of preservation projects, including the Deltic Preservation Society and the Brighton Belle project [http://www.brightonbelle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=200113].

This is a workaday place. Visitors are welcome, but there’s a healthy preoccupation with getting jobs done. Contemplate the hours of graft that bring back the neglected railway heritage; ask questions and show an interest. It’s places like Barrow Hill that keep the antique wheels on the modern rails.

Didcot Railway Centre has something of the same atmosphere, but is more fully developed as a tourist site.

For details of opening-times and special events at Barrow Hill, see Barrow Hill Roundhouse Museum – Britain’s last surviving working Roundhouse.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list features the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and 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.

Rail museum proceeds with caution

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National Railway Museum, York: Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway signalman training model

It’s an interesting reflection on British culture that, in addition to a National Gallery and a National Portrait Gallery, we have a National Collection of railway vehicles – 280 locomotives and items of rolling stock, most of them distributed between the Science Museum in London, the Locomotion museum at Shildon, Co Durham, and the National Railway Museum in York [http://www.nrm.org.uk/OurCollection/LocomotivesAndRollingStock.aspx?pageNo=1&cat=All&comp=All&ipp=96].

The York museum has something for everyone. I once took a school group there, and discovered the kids enthusiastically tracking the lavatory outlets on the Royal Train carriages.

NRM York, as it’s now called, started in a small way, built around the core collection of historic artefacts that came from the Stockton & Darlington Railway and its successors, the North Eastern and London & North Eastern Railways. Gradually, the other three of the pre-war “Big Four” railways added items which ultimately found a home on the site of the York North locomotive depot, literally across the line from the city’s passenger station.

This location has been repeatedly transformed, in 1975 when the Museum opened celebrating the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, in 1990-2 when the main building was re-roofed to create the Great Hall and in 1999 when the site was extended to create The Works.

There is so much potential in this vast collection of transport memorabilia. I’d particularly like to see the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway’s signalman training model displayed with sufficient space to appreciate fully its scale and complexity.

And the miracle of the NRM and the other great national museums and galleries is that they continue to offer free admission.

For that we should be grateful – and as generous as possible in support.

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