Monthly Archives: January 2014

Water palace

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Victoria Baths, Chorlton-cum-Medlock, Manchester

Victoria Baths, Chorlton-cum-Medlock, Manchester

Building projects overrun their budgets more often than not, and sometimes the reasons are heinous.  Sometimes, though, whether through blameworthy incompetence or honest accident, the results are priceless.

When the Victoria Baths at Chorlton-cum-Medlock on the south side of Manchester opened in 1906, the Lord Mayor, Mr J Herbert Thewlis, called it “a water palace of which every citizen of Manchester is proud”.

The building was designed by the Manchester City Architect, Henry Price, in exuberant red brick and yellow faience, contained three swimming pools, Turkish and Russian baths in the grandest surroundings municipal enterprise could contrive.  It’s a festival of tiles, mosaic and church-quality stained glass.

However, the Manchester Guardian, while lauding the splendour of “…probably the most splendid municipal bathing institution in the country…” added, “…But the cost has been heavy…”  The amount was reported to be £54,144 – double the average cost of such facilities at the time.

To the accusations of municipal extravagance the Chairman of the Baths Committee, Alderman Rothwell, retorted –

He would recommend the Baths Committee to do nothing that he would not do on his own account and he had gone so far as to say, in answer to these criticisms, that if Manchester City Council should happen to be dissatisfied with that institution and should pass a resolution to the effect that it was on sale, the City Council had a purchaser tomorrow who would pay them every penny it had cost.

It’s no accident that the Victoria Baths stood on the border between an increasingly densely populated working-class district and the more well-to-do but declining suburbs beyond.

It was actually three separate baths – the First Class Male Bath was designed with raked gallery seating for spectators, separate slipper baths, and a direct link to the Turkish Baths, the more functional Second Class Male Bath and, lastly, the Female Bath.

Fresh water was piped to the First Class Male Bath, from which it was filtered and transferred to the Second Class Male Bath, then passed finally to the Female Bath.  Oral testimony recalls that these changes of water took place on Thursdays and Sundays, and that local users tended to avoid swimming on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The Victoria Baths operated with few alterations until 1993:  its closure caused an immediate outcry and the formation of the Friends of the Victoria Baths and the Victoria Baths Trust.  Ten years later the Baths won the BBC Restoration competition, and since then £5 million has been spent making the place weatherproof and fit for further use.

There’s still some way to go before the Baths is fully operational again.  Details of the project and of opening-days and events can be found at http://www.victoriabaths.org.uk/visit.

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

Gothic New Zealand: Wellington 2

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St Paul's Cathedral, Wellington, New Zealand

St Paul’s Cathedral, Wellington, New Zealand

St Mary & the Angels Roman Catholic Church, Wellington, New Zealand

St Mary & the Angels Roman Catholic Church, Wellington, New Zealand

The city of Wellington stands on shaky ground, lying across a major geological fault in an area of constant seismic activity.  When I visited Wellington in February 2011, local people were particularly concerned at the tribulations in Christchurch, a city which had been considered much less vulnerable than their own.

Within a very few years of its first settlement in 1840, two major earthquakes occurred in 1848 and 1855, and as a result all Wellington’s early buildings were built in timber, including what are now called the Old Government Buildings (1875-6), the second-largest wooden building in the world, and the pro-cathedral, Old St Paul’s (1866).

The Anglican diocese of Wellington was about to start the replacement for Old St Paul’s when the Second World War intervened.  Influenced by the effect of the 1931 earthquake in Napier, North Island, the architect Cecil Walter Wood (1878–1947) decided against building a medieval-Gothic building in ferro-concrete and instead used reinforced concrete to create a design that uses Gothic forms, modernised under the influence of Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall (1911-23) and the Art Deco movement, and looking towards Sir Edwin Maufe’s Guildford Cathedral (1936-61):  http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4w25/1/2.

(Similar influences are visible in Charles Towle’s uncompleted design for Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland.)

Cecil Wood never saw even the beginning of his St Paul’s Cathedral.  Queen Elizabeth II laid the foundation stone in 1954, and the first phase was opened ten years later.  The bulk of the nave was added in the second phase, 1970-2.  A historic Lady Chapel, formerly the 1905 timber St Paul’s Church, Paraparaumu, North Island, was added in 1991, and the westernmost bays of the nave, the narthex and the bell-tower were finished in 1998.

Though it was criticised from the start, and modified after his death, Cecil Wood’s design has retained its integrity.

I found it attractive – an architectural essay at the furthest edge of anything you could call Gothic – with a traditional layout, high round arches, subtle use of natural light and quirky arcades that reminded me of details from J R Leathart & W F Granger’s late 1920s cinemas, of which the Odeon, Richmond-on-Thames (1929) survives.

The glass entrance-screen is immediately familiar to British eyes, because the engraved angels are by New Zealand artist John Hutton (1906-1978), who also made the Screen of Saints and Angels for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral (1962).  [See http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Cathedral_History.]

The Catholic Cathedral in Wellington is the opposite of Gothic:  the Sacred Heart Cathedral is an uncompromisingly Italianate basilica of 1901, replacing the Gothic St Mary’s, built in 1851 and destroyed by fire in 1898:  http://www.shcathedral.wellington.net.nz/history/index.htm.

However, Wellington has a rare example of modern Gothic, the Catholic Church of St Mary & the Angels, built 1919-22 in ferro-concrete by Frederick de Jersey Clere.  It’s a world away from Cecil Wood’s cathedral, yet hides its modern construction within traditional architectural forms:  http://www.historic.org.nz/TheRegister/RegisterSearch/RegisterResults.aspx?RID=36&m=advanced.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

 

Gothic New Zealand: Wellington 1

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Old St Paul's Church, Wellington, New Zealand

Old St Paul’s Church, Wellington, New Zealand

I explained in Gothic New Zealand:  Auckland 2 that the first and only Bishop of New Zealand, George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878), brought to the antipodes the Ecclesiological idea that a church must have pointed arches and all the architectural paraphernalia of the Middle Ages.

He was an Anglican cleric operating in a context where, until a few years before he reached New Zealand in 1841, Australia had been an archdeaconry in the diocese of Calcutta.  By the time he returned to England for the last time in 1868, New Zealand had seven Anglican bishoprics.

A visible part of Selwyn’s legacy is the New Zealand tradition of building timber churches that have the shapes of masonry construction.

The first Anglican cathedral in Wellington, now known as Old St Paul’s, was designed by an architect-turned-clergyman, Rev Frederick Thatcher (1814-1890), who was closely associated with Bishop Selwyn.

It was the pro-cathedral for the Diocese of Wellington from 1866, when it was built, until 1964, when the bishop’s throne, the cathedra, moved to the new St Paul’s Cathedral.

To save it from demolition the New Zealand Government took on Old St Paul’s as a historic site, and it remains consecrated.

Like other “Selwyn” churches, it is a warm and welcoming place, the darkness of its walls contrasting with the brilliance of its stained glass windows.

I didn’t have the opportunity to join a service in my short stay, but I sat at dinner with a lady who told me she always visits St Paul’s at Christmas, and at other times, because singing hymns and carols there is “like singing inside a violin”.

For further details, see http://www.historicplaces.org.nz/placestovisit/lowernorthisland/oldstpauls.aspx.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

“A mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive”

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Castle Howard: Mausoleum

Castle Howard: Mausoleum

Horace Walpole, a man not easily impressed, was bowled over by Castle Howard:

Nobody had informed me that at one view I should see a palace, a town, a fortified city, temples on high places, woods worthy of being each a metropolis of the Druids, the noblest lawn in the world fenced by half the horizon, and a mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive;  in short, I have seen gigantic places before, but never a sublime one.

Charles, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, proclaimed in his inscription on an obelisk near the house that he –

…ERECTED A CASTLE WHERE THE OLD CASTLE OF
HENDERSKELFE STOOD, AND CALL’D IT CASTLE-HOWARD.
HE LIKEWISE MADE THE PLANTATIONS IN THIS PARK
AND ALL THE OUT-WORKS, MONUMENTS AND OTHER
PLANTATIONS BELONGING TO THE SAID SEAT.

Of all these out-works and monuments, the most sublime is undoubtedly the Mausoleum, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1728-9, begun in 1731, and completed substantially to the original design in 1742, six years after Hawksmoor’s death and four years after Carlisle’s.

This great domed rotunda, seventy-six feet high, its twenty slender Doric columns set deliberately narrowly together, sitting on a bastion of gargantuan proportions, is a noble monument not only to Lord Carlisle, whose remains were finally laid to rest there, but also to its designer, who never saw it.

Members of the Howard family continue to be interred in the Mausoleum, which is off limits to ordinary visitors.

But it is possible to see inside the Mausoleum, and to visit other inaccessible parts of the estate, on pre-booked walking tours which are detailed in the Castle Howard website at http://www.castlehoward.co.uk/Whats-On.html.

The walking isn’t strenuous, though the tour can take up to 2½ hours.  It’s worth every step.

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.

The Brideshead set

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Great Hall with murals by Scott Medd (1962-3), Castle Howard, North Yorkshire

Great Hall with murals by Scott Medd (1962-3), Castle Howard, North Yorkshire

Castle Howard is not Brideshead, though it owes a great deal to Brideshead Revisited.

It’s acknowledged that Evelyn Waugh’s wartime novel was based on the Lygon family who lived at the very different Madresfield Court, Worcestershire, which has its own stock of stories:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/8270238/Madresfield-Court-The-Kings-redoubt-if-Hitler-called.html.

The scandal which envelopes Lord Brideshead is nowhere near as dramatic as that which overtook the 7th Earl Beauchamp, a man who always carried £100 in cash “in case I have to hire a train”.  When his brother-in-law, ‘Bendor’, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, maliciously outed him, Lady Beauchamp remarked absently, “Bendor says that Beauchamp is a bugler.”

The only connection between Brideshead and Castle Howard is through television, and it’s proved crucial to the fortunes of the house and its family, the Howards.

The house was built by their ancestor, Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle (c1669-1738), who hired the multitalented playwright, John Vanburgh (1664-1726), to design a baroque palace on the site of the ancient castle of Henderskelfe.

The Great Hall is a stupendous space, seventy feet high and fifty-two feet square, surmounted by the great dome.  The paintings of the hall, dome and high saloon were by the Venetian Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and the Huguenot Jean Herve.

In the period before the Second World War, canny country-house owners offered their properties to well-behaved girls’ schools:  the Duke of Devonshire, for example, saw to it by this means that Chatsworth was well looked after, but at Castle Howard an accidental fire on November 9th 1940 gutted much of the interior and destroyed Vanburgh’s dome.

The owner George Howard (1920-1984) spent much of his adult life breathing life back into Castle Howard.  The dome was restored in 1960 and the lost Pelligrini murals reproduced a couple of years later by the Canadian painter, Scott Medd (1911-1984).

George Howard, who was at the time Chairman of the Board of Governors of the BBC, was very glad to hire the place to Granada TV for their series-adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1981).  The proceeds enabled him to rebuild some of the rooms on the south front, to the designs of Julian Bicknell with paintings by Felix Kelly.

His son, the Hon Simon Howard, the present owner, similarly welcomed Julian Jarrold’s feature-film production in 2007 (released 2008).  This enabled further rooms to be brought back to use, and the story is told in an exhibition ‘Brideshead Restored: The Story of Restoration at Castle Howard and Brideshead Revisited’.

For thousands of visitors and millions of viewers, Castle Howard is Brideshead.  It isn’t really, but it might as well be.

Castle Howard deserves a day to itself, at almost any time of the year:  http://www.castlehoward.co.uk.  If the house is open don’t miss eating in the Fitzroy Room restaurant.

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.

The Rookery

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The Rookery, Chicago

The Rookery, Chicago

One of the most magnificent examples of the nineteenth-century revolution in construction is the Rookery Building in Chicago’s Loop, built by Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912) and John Wellborn Root (1850-1891) during the explosion of innovation that followed the great fire of 1871.

Under pressure to rebuild the city quickly, the group of architects we now call the “Chicago School” mastered the techniques of building high buildings on a swampy site, and in doing so virtually invented the skyscraper.

The Rookery is externally conventional:  above the second storey its outside walls are entirely load-bearing masonry.  On the inside, however, the central light-court is framed by cast-iron columns, wrought-iron spandrels and steel beams.

Its spectacular atrium, lit by a glazed skylight roof and embellished by dramatic staircases to and above the mezzanine balcony, is one of the architectural wonders of Chicago.

It was modernised in 1905 by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), who encased Root’s elaborately ornamental wrought iron and terracotta with gilded, incised white marble panels that picked up the carved ornament of Burnham & Root’s exterior.

Burnham & Root – before Root’s untimely death – and, later on, Frank Lloyd Wright each based their practices in the building.

A further, clumsy refurbishment in 1931 obscured much of the quality of the original designs, and in 1992 a careful restoration by McClier Architects brought back the full impact of its 1905 appearance.

Indeed, McClier left exposed one of Root’s cast-iron columns to show the contrast between the original design and Frank Lloyd Wright’s radical make-over.

The lobby of the Rookery Building is freely accessible to visitors, on regular tours, but the light court is less often seen:  http://www.therookerybuilding.com/building-features.html.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust offers tours of the Rookery Building on a regular basis –  http://gowright.org/visit/rookery.html – and the Chicago Architectural Foundation includes the Rookery in their rich programme of architectural experiences:  https://tickets.architecture.org/public/default.asp.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City: the architecture of Chicago please click here.

Right idea, wrong moment

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Oriel Chambers, Water Street, Liverpool

Oriel Chambers, Water Street, Liverpool

When I take groups around Liverpool city-centre, I pause in front of Oriel Chambers on Water Street, and invite people to guess the date of the building.  Most people get it wildly wrong, as I originally did, unless they’re sharp-eyed enough to spot the date high in the central gable.

Oriel Chambers is a tall, elegant office-block, its framework picked out in nail-headed stone mullions which frame the delicate cast-iron windows which give it its name.

It would do credit to an architect of the present generation:  in fact it was completed in 1864 by a virtually unknown architect, Peter Ellis Jnr (1804-1884), who for his pains was virtually laughed out of the profession.

Its inner courtyard (inaccessible to the public), faced with cantilevered iron cladding, even more uncompromisingly anticipates the Modern Movement.   Except for one other framed building a couple of streets away, 16 Cook Street (1866), Ellis built hardly anywhere else.

Oriel Chambers is also significant in engineering history because Peter Ellis installed the first ever example of a paternoster lift:  https://madeupinbritain.uk/Paternoster.

The Builder pompously dismissed Oriel Chambers out of hand:

The plainest brick warehouse in town is infinitely superior as a building to that large agglomeration of protruding plate-glass bubbles in Water Street termed Oriel Chambers.   Did we not see this vast abortion – which would be depressing were it not ludicrous – with our own eyes, we should have doubted the possibility of its existence.  Where and in what are their beauties [sic] supposed to lie?

Ellis’ obituary in the Liverpool Daily Post (October 24th 1884) describes him as an architect and surveyor “held in high esteem by the members of his own profession” without mentioning a single building or design.

It’s possible, however, that Ellis’ genius had a distant flowering.

After the fall of Atlanta in 1864, an American planter with Liverpool business connections, Simon Root, sent his son to Liverpool for the duration of the American Civil War.  The son was John Wellborn Root (1850-1891), who returned to the USA and became one of the leaders of the Chicago School of architects, responsible for the development of iron- and steel-framed buildings and the birth of the skyscraper in New York and Chicago .

1860s Liverpool wasn’t a big place by modern expectations.  It’s likely that the young Root noticed Ellis’ buildings and the fireproof warehouses that Jesse Hartley and George Fosbery Lyster had built along the river front.

There’s no proof, but there’s a strong likelihood that the magnificent achievement of the Chicago School of architects may have a root in the Liverpool buildings that contemporary architects didn’t give the time of day.

The first monograph on the life and work of Peter Ellis is Robert Ainsworth & Graham Jones, In the Footsteps of Peter Ellis (Liverpool History Society 2013).

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

Flat-pack churches

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St George's Church, Everton, Liverpool

St George’s Church, Everton, Liverpool

The idea of prefabricating architectural bits and pieces for export to the colonies predates the Victorian period.

There was a remarkable collaboration between Thomas Rickman (1776-1841), who became Professor of Architecture at the Liverpool Academy, and John Cragg (1767-1854), the owner of the Mersey Iron Foundry, who was described by a contemporary as “a remarkable man to whom I cannot find a single gracious allusion on anybody’s part”.

Rickman is the archaeological scholar who worked out the chronology of medieval churches, and gave us the expressions ‘Norman’, ‘Early English’ and ‘Decorated’:  [See ‘Buried Lives’ in Barton-on-Humber].

The pair collaborated on three pilot projects in Liverpool:  one, St Philip, Hardman Street, has long gone;  the other two survive as distinctive monuments to nineteenth-century innovation.

At St George’s Church, Everton (1812-14), though the external walls and the tower are stone, the whole of the interior structure – columns, roof-beams, braces and panels – and the window-tracery are of delicate, finely-detailed castings.

The same moulds were also used in Cragg’s own neighbourhood when they built St Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Toxteth (1814-15), where the walls are brick (at one time stuccoed), and all the external architectural detail, such as pinnacles and copings, is also of iron.

Thomas Rickman felt confident that churches could be constructed on these lines for no more than £6,000 each.  In fact, when John Cragg built St Michael-in-the-Hamlet at his own expense, the total outlay using the moulds from St George’s came to £7,865.

Though cast-iron tracery and other ecclesiastical decoration is not uncommon in early-nineteenth century churches and other Gothic Revival buildings, I’ve never come across any reference to recognisable examples of Rickman’s designs for the Mersey Iron Foundry turning up anywhere outside England.

Perhaps somewhere, in a distant land, there’s a church or chapel built from the same kit as the two Liverpool churches.

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.

Victorian lace

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Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia

Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia

Victorian Society study-days are an excellent way of learning about architecture and art from acknowledged experts, and I particularly enjoyed Function and Fantasy:  decorative iron and Victorian architecture at the Art Workers’ Guild on March 24th 2012.

The leader, Paul Dobraszczyk, author of the fascinating book Into the Belly of the Beast (Spire 2009), fielded a high-performance team of specialists on iron-founding, railways, the seaside, prefabricated iron buildings for export and conservation.

From the outset, Paul made it clear that in the Victorian age cast-iron was particularly exciting because it was the first completely new building-material for several hundred years.  There were structural problems involved in using cast- and wrought-iron, many of which were eventually resolved as cheap steel became available towards the end of the nineteenth century.

When we recognise the innovatory qualities of a material we now take for granted it’s easier to understand the sheer exuberance of the Victorians’ use of decorative ironwork in every kind of structure from shop-fronts to fountains, bandstands to urinals.

I was interested to hear David Mitchell, who spoke about Scottish iron-foundries, firmly knock on the head the legend that the decorative ironwork which Australians call “lace” was exported from the UK as ships’ ballast.  No-one in their right mind would use such a material simply as dead weight.

The more likely truth is that the Australians used pig-iron ballast to cast the ironwork which embellished so many of their nineteenth-century houses, pubs and public buildings.

For details of future Victorian Society events, see http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/events.

 

Celebrating King’s Cross

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King's Cross Station, London: departures concourse roof

King’s Cross Station, London: departures concourse roof

At last the new concourse for London’s King’s Cross Station has opened, elegantly spanning the space between the west wall of Cubitt’s trainshed and the gentle curve of the Great Northern Hotel.

It’s a spectacular uninterrupted space, spanned by John McAslan’s semi-circular geometrically interesting roof, easy to navigate if you’re in a hurry, with space to sit and wait above the throng.

The considerable challenge of linking and respecting the contrasting architecture of the two Victorian stations, King’s Cross and St Pancras, is met in an unequivocally twenty-first-century manner.

It used to be so different.  Not that many years ago, nobody hung around King’s Cross unless they were deeply naïve or even more deeply dodgy.

It could have been so very different, if the best-laid plans of local authorities and commercial developers had ever been fulfilled.

Henry Porter, in an article in The Observer (March 25th 2012) [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/henry-porter-kings-cross-new-concourse?INTCMP=SRCH], describes how a succession of financially-driven schemes came to grief in a succession of economic downturns, and how the persistence of local activists, led by the King’s Cross Railway Lands Group [http://www.kxrlg.org.uk], led the way towards a community-based solution.

His main message is that “the wisdom of citizens should routinely count for much more than it does in British planning, because it is always local people who understand the aspirations of their community and the way their particular public spaces work”.

The King’s Cross Railway Lands Group is monitoring what looks like a signal success:  the block across the Euston Road from King’s Cross Station is the subject of an incompletely thought-out proposal, and the Group continues to challenge the designs to replace the 1970s frontispiece of Cubitt’s station after the Olympics.

There is no final victory in the campaign to protect the environment, but there are successes.

And this is a moment to be grateful that groups such as the King’s Cross Railway Lands Group plug away for decades at a time, even when the chances of success look most slender.

Earlier blog-articles about King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations are Built around beer barrels, Midland Grand, King’s Cross and Midland Grand renaissance.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture on St Pancras Station and the Midland Grand Hotel please click here.