Monthly Archives: January 2014

Pinnacle of the Jazz Age

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Chrysler Building, New York City

Chrysler Building, New York City

Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan (1979) first inspired me to visit New York.  Freddie Laker’s Skytrain made it possible, in the summer of 1981.  My former school-friend, Malcolm, at that time lived on E41St, so when I came out of his apartment each morning, the first building I saw was the Chrysler Building, the epitome of Jazz Age New York.

The Chrysler was built, not by the Chrysler Corporation, but by Walter P Chrysler on his own account.  Its architect, William Van Alen, engaged in a race with his former professional partner, H Craig Severance, to build the tallest building in the world.

The story is repeatedly told of how Van Alen waited until Severance’s 40 Wall Street was topped out at 927 feet before launching the 27-ton, 125-foot steel spire, which had been secretly delivered to the site in pieces, through the roof in ninety minutes flat on the night of Friday September 27th 1929, giving a final height of 1,046 feet 4¾ inches.  Van Alen remarked afterwards that “it was necessary to resort to the unusual”.

This procedure is explained in ‘How engineers crowned world’s tallest building’, Popular Science, August 1930, p 52 at http://kanikasweet-amazing.blogspot.com/2011/10/unreal-structures-built-in-secret.html in the section ‘Chrysler Building’s secret spire’.

Black Thursday, the beginning of the Wall Street Crash, came less than a month later, on October 24th 1929, and the Chrysler has always had a fin-d’époque air.  It was the tallest building in the world for all of eleven months, until the rival Empire State Building was in turn topped out.

The building is known for its embellishments, the genuine Chrysler hubcaps fixed to the brickwork around the 30th floor, the corner features at the 31st floor based on Chrysler radiator caps and the eagle-gargoyles on the 61st floor, modelled on the hood (boot) handles of the 1929 Plymouth.  Its diamond-honed Enduro KA-2 stainless steel cladding by the German manufacturer Krupp has needed neither cleaning nor replacement since it was installed.  Lewis Mumford dismissed it as “advertising architecture”.

The red African marble lobby with its ceiling mural by the English artist, Frank Brangwyn, carefully restored by the current owners, is accessible to the general public, though if you try to take a photograph the security guards become agitated.  I’ve never dared outface them to enter one of the elevators, which are also apparently still in original condition.

When the Chrysler opened, the 66th-68th floors were given over to the Cloud Club, the most blatant speakeasy in Prohibition New York.  Long before the police stepped out of the elevator the members’ liquor could be stowed in individual lockers, personalised by indecipherable hieroglyphics.  Its decoration included a Georgian lobby, a Tudor lounge, a Bavarian bar and a dining room with faceted blue marble columns and white-ice sconces and a vaulted ceiling painted with clouds.  All this survived a couple of decades after the club finally closed in 1979, only to be ripped out and dumped at the end of the 1990s.  Randy Juster’s images of the club area are at http://decopix.com/art_deco_photo_galleries/the-cloud-club;  there are further images of the Chrysler Building at http://adamunderhill.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/the-chrysler-building-new-yorks-art-deco-masterpiece.

Above the Cloud Club, on the 71st floor, was a public observatory giving views into neighbouring states across fifty miles in each direction [http://flappergirlcreations.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/the-chrysler-buildings-long-lost-observatory].  This closed after the Second World War and is now the offices of an architectural practice [see http://chryslerbuilding.circa68.net/cloudclub.html].

Though the Chrysler Building nominally has 77 floors, in fact there are more levels, each tapering within the spire, lit oddly by the shark’s tooth windows.  The 74th floor contains a derelict radio station.  Above the 75th floor the windows have never been glazed, so it’s exceptionally draughty, even on hot days.

Beyond the final floor, 77, a further seven levels accessible by ladder lead eventually to an area about a yard square, which gives access to a trapdoor through which, once a month, an engineer checks the base of the lightning conductor.

There is a detailed description of this by David Michaelis at http://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2002/03/inside-the-needle-the-chrysler-building-gets-lit.

Another enjoyable essay on the building is by Claudia Roth Pierpont, ‘The Silver Spire:  how two men’s dreams changed the skyline of New York’, which appeared in The New Yorker, November 18th 2002, and can be found at http://jayebee.com/discoveries/criticism/silver_spire.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

Outside the box

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

Photo:  Midlands Churchcrawler

I didn’t realise when I first posted an article about St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield how many of my neighbours I would stir up.

A local resident started a website to campaign for the future of the building – http://sthildas.webs.com/:  the associated petition attracted over three hundred signatures, most of them local.

I did an interview on BBC Radio Sheffield and an article has appeared in the Sheffield Star newspaper.

Local people woke up to the probability that a distinguished local landmark is about to disappear, and those individuals who have a past connection with St Hilda’s were particularly upset that it could disappear.

Since it finally closed for services in 2007, there seems to have been no mention or discussion of its fate in the local media, and I could find no proposal to replace it with any other kind of building.

Local politicians explained, politely but wearily, that the problem had been around for years, and say that they wouldn’t stand in the way of a practical, businesslike scheme to save the building.

Some national amenity societies were encouraging, but their brief is primarily to engage with English Heritage within their guidelines, which are interpreted to the disadvantage of St Hilda’s.

Members of the core group of supporters made contact with the Church Commissioners, who currently still owned the building.

One can’t blame the Church Commissioners for their disinclination to support a redundant building at the expense of the real work of the Church.  It’s a pity, nevertheless, that the situation wasn’t advertised a good deal more loudly in the streets that surround St Hilda’s.

Not everyone loved the building.  One commentator on a web forum said she thought it looked like a factory, which suggests a sanguine view of Sheffield’s industrial architecture.

In the Sheffield Local Studies Library I came across a run of parish magazines from the late 1980s which show exactly how a once thriving parish went downhill.

In April 1988, the month before the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration, the vicar, Father Roger Bellamy, enumerated the previous year’s rites of passage:   baptisms – 11;  confirmations – 0;  marriages – 0;  blessing of a marriage – 1;  funerals – 57.  He noted that fund-raising was “not a great success”.

At the end of 1988 he estimated the active membership of the parish at 42, and expected around ten of those to be “lost”, through age or migration, over the following year.

At the start of 1990 he commented:  “We are facing the realities of our situation:  a small congregation, a largeish building and a remarkable indifference to us from the parish.”

It’s not so much the eleventh hour as after midnight for St Hilda’s, too late – as it turned out – for those of us who live on the spot and care about the building’s existence to audit whether there really were community and commercial needs that it could serve, and to identify any positive, practical proposals to present to the owners and the planners.

Old-fashioned for its date

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St Catherine's Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield

St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield

When I was collecting signatures for the petition to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield, a gentleman who knows a thing or two about historic building conservation told me a scurrilous tale suggesting that listed-building inspectors aren’t always infallible.

Apparently the very fine Italianate St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield was originally listed Grade II and dated “c1860”.

In fact, the original, temporary St Catherine’s by M E Hadfield & Son was built in 1884 on an entirely different site on Andover Street.

Eventually, the very fine permanent church that stands on the corner of Burngreave Road and Melrose Street was built to designs by the Halifax architects Charles Edward Fox & Son and consecrated with great ceremony in 1926.

Its interior is sumptuous:  black marble columns with Carrara capitals support a coffered ceiling over the nave.  The aisles are vaulted.  The chancel apse has a mosaic frieze with a cornice of Connemara marble, under which stands a baldachino, its canopy supporting a statue of Christ the King.

I’m told that when this date came to light English Heritage promptly delisted it on the grounds that it was so recent – and so old-fashioned for its date.

I’ve found no evidence to back this story, except that St Catherine’s does not appear on the current English Heritage list.

The fact that an authentic-looking Italian basilica was planted in the midst of inner-city Sheffield in the year of the General Strike is actually more significant than if it was simply a mid-Victorian Italianate church.

On the night of its consecration – the Feast of St Catherine – the Bishop of Leeds carried the Sacred Host from the temporary church to the new building in a torchlit procession.  Two thousand Sheffield Catholics turned out to witness their faith, and Canon Charles Leteux pointed out in an address to the crowds that “their public procession made history, for not twenty years before, a similar function in London had been banned by the orders of the Prime Minister”.

Apparently, the legislation banning public processions by clergy and members of the Roman Catholic Church was repealed soon after St Catherine’s opened.

It’s salutary to consider the power and energy that invested organised religion in Britain up to the Second World War.

For this reason, apart from its aesthetic value, St Catherine’s deserves to be recognised for its historic interest.  Fortunately, this church apparently continues to thrive, unlike so many.

Alma de Cuba

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Former St Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Seel Street, Liverpool

Former St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, Seel Street, Liverpool

If you’re looking for somewhere unusual to eat in the centre of Liverpool you can do a lot worse than Alma de Cuba [http://www.alma-de-cuba.com/homepage] on Seel Street, one of the streets running parallel to, and between, Bold Street and Duke Street, within easy walking distance of Lime Street and Liverpool One.

This vibrant, ultra-modern bar restaurant sits inside the oldest surviving Catholic church building in Liverpool.

Indeed, St Peter’s Church is astonishingly old for a post-Reformation Catholic place of worship.  It opened in 1788, ten years after the passing of the first Act of Parliament rescinding the penal laws governing the persecution of Catholics ever since Tudor times.

St Peter’s thrived as a place of worship for nearly two hundred years.

When it could no longer support a local congregation it was transferred in 1976 to the Polish Catholic community and rededicated to Our Lady of Czestochowa.  This attempt to keep it going lasted only two years.

Eventually, the developer Urban Splash rescued the building and it opened as a particularly fine Latin American restaurant in August 2005.

It’s the sort of place where award-winning barmen toss glasses in the air and usually catch them.  And Sunday brunch is enlivened with, of all things, a Gospel choir.

The walls are stripped to the bare brickwork and the ceiling has been removed, revealing the roof-beams.  The ornate Classical sanctuary is intact, with a plate-glass mirror in place of the reredos.

It’s disconcerting to eat and drink and listen to music while staring at the inscription “TU ES PETRUS” – Christ’s words to St Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” [Matthew 16:18].

The contrast between spirituality and hedonism isn’t quite comfortable, and some customers might look askance at the restaurant’s tag-line “Heaven can wait”.

Nevertheless, the building – arguably the most precious archaeological gem of the proud Liverpool Catholic community – survives and is physically safe.  It needn’t be a restaurant for ever, and at least it’s not a pile of rubble.

For so many former places of worship, that’s all too likely a fate.

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.

Reformed chapel

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Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Former Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2012)

Some buildings stick in the memory for entirely sentimental reasons.  I passed the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield every morning in my first five years of schooling.

My Auntie Nellie lived literally next door.  It formed the background to my earliest memories of backyard Bonfire Nights when Uncle Charlie was in charge of the box of matches:  in Coronation year the biggest bang of all came when Auntie Nellie’s new pressure-cooker, inexpertly screwed down, exploded and spattered mushy peas all over the kitchen ceiling.

My latest memory of this thriving temple of Methodism is of my cousin Cathryn singing at a chapel anniversary in the early 1960s.

It’s an austerely attractive, utterly unremarkable building, unlisted, invisible in the Sheffield Local Studies Library index.

Built in 1890, its foundation stones were laid by a star-studded cast of Sheffield’s most important Methodists, such as Jethro and Samson Chambers, Robert Hadfield and Frederick Mappin – all of them men of steel with Attercliffe connections, the latter two later to become baronets.

Its registration for marriages was cancelled because it was no longer used for worship in 1966.

My 1977 image of the building shows the brickwork still encrusted with industrial grime and most of the windows smashed.

No-one would have given tuppence for its chances of survival.

Nowadays it sparkles:  it’s well-maintained;  its windows are renewed and its brickwork is beautifully cleaned.  It serves as the Jamiyat Tableegh ul Islam Mosque.

So historic buildings which are not worth listing can survive if someone finds an appropriate use for them that will justify their upkeep.

Praised with faint damns

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

After I first expressed an interest in the threatened St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I was shown the Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report, from which I quoted in Church going, which recommended the building for listing.

I’ve now seen the latest English Heritage advice-report rejecting that recommendation.  The task of an English Heritage inspector is to evaluate the building in the context of its national significance, according to guidelines which are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/publications/docs/places_of_worship_final.pdf.  At the end of these guidelines (p 20) is a comment that “while all listed buildings are of national importance, local factors may sometimes be of significance”.

St Hilda’s failed the tests when it was last inspected in October 2011.  There’s more than a hint of de haut en bas about the inspector’s silky comments.

The architect, Leslie Moore, is described as a “junior partner” to his better-known father-in-law, which he would be, being the son-in-law.  The original design of 1922 had a “strong resemblance” to Temple Moore’s St Mary, Nunthorpe, but the rather different building of 1935-8 is “simplified down” – as if an imitation is preferable to an adaptation while still not quite good enough.

It’s described as a “plain rectangular box”, which it certainly isn’t, “old-fashioned for [its] date”, built of red engineering brick which is “common”, like most of inter-war Sheffield, and the interior, embellished by George Pace, is “austere”.  Ruth Harman and John Minnis clearly thought it merited an illustration in their Pevsner Architectural Guide Sheffield (2004), p 188.

All this suggests that if St Hilda’s has aesthetic worth, it belongs on a local list in “recognition of its architectural or historical importance and its value to the local community” [see https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/urban-design–conservation/locallisting-.html].  Somehow, it seems not to have been considered so far as a candidate for the local list.

It’s not for me to assert that the national inspector and the local planners are wrong about St Hilda’s.  I think it’s a memorable, exciting, confident building that could once more be put to good use.  None of those epithets is necessarily a criterion for listing.

It would be peevish to point to listed buildings in the locality that might compare with St Hilda’s, but it is pertinent to point to some of the interesting, attractive and potentially useful structures that Sheffield has lost over the decades when listed-building legislation has existed to protect the built environment – the Britannia Music Hall, Huntsman’s Gardens Schools and the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe.

While St Hilda’s stands, there’s a chance of saving it – and it’s worth saving, whether it’s worth listing or not.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Gorton renaissance

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Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

In November 1861 four Franciscan friars arrived in Manchester to set up the Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, serving the working-class community that grew up round the nearby railway works.

Their buildings were designed by Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75), who possessed much of the vigour of his father, A W N Pugin, and were constructed largely by the physical labour of the brothers and their parishioners.

The first stone was laid on May 24th 1862, and the three wings of the original monastery were complete by 1867.  To raise funds for the Infant School in 1867 Father Francis hired the Free Trade Hall for a bazaar which raised £1,000.

E W Pugin’s magnificent church, 184ft long, 98ft wide and 100ft high, dominates the streets of Gorton and is clearly visible from central Manchester.

By 1900 the Catholic population of Gorton had increased from 300 to over 6,000.  The fathers saw the parish change from a poor village community, initially dependent on cotton (and badly hit by the effects of the American Civil War), into an industrial inner-city suburb.

For almost a century they provided spiritual and pastoral support to the people of Gorton, and – because many of those people were drawn from Wexford, Waterford and Cork – Gaelic classes, lantern lectures on Irish history and St Patrick’s Day celebrations.  They also exported missionaries to China, Peru and elsewhere.

The surrounding nineteenth-century housing was cleared in the early 1970s, and the Monastery became unsustainable.  Eventually, the Franciscans sold the site for £75,000 to a developer who planned to divide the church into a seven-storey apartment-block but instead went bankrupt.

The abandoned buildings were quickly and badly vandalised.  Lead and slates were removed, and there were repeated arson attacks.  Virtually all the decorative features of interest or value were removed or smashed.

In 1997 the Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust bought the Monastery for £1 and began the formidable task of bringing the place back into use.  Cornering funds was not the least of their labours:  the Architectural Heritage Fund, English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, New East Manchester (NEM) and the North West Development Agency (NWDA) between them chipped in millions.

Fixtures that had disappeared in the dark days of dereliction have returned.  A complete set of twelve statues, stolen from the lofty nave arcades, famously appeared as garden ornaments at Sotheby’s:  Manchester City Council bought them for £25,000 and stored them until September 2011 when they returned to the site for restoration.

The art-dealer Patricia Wengraft [http://www.patwengraf.com/Patricia-Wengraf-Fine-European-Sculpture-and-Works-Art-Intro-DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=1] secured the return of the huge crucifix:  http://www.manchester.gov.uk/news/article/1954/monasterys_giant_crucifix_is_hoisted_back_into_place.  The chains to support it had been handed in mysteriously some time before.

I remember the first public opening in September 2005:  people queued down the street, showing immediately how much St Francis’ Monastery meant to local people who’d grown up, been baptised or married here, and had been uprooted.

The Monastery reopened fully as a community, conference and events centre in 2007.  It’s open to the public most Sundays:  see what’s on offer at http://www.themonastery.co.uk/Whats-on.html.

I would have liked to see something similar happen to St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield.

Just because a place of worship is no longer needed for worship doesn’t prevent it having enormous value to people.

But making the transition requires enormous energy, imagination, devotion, acumen – and the creative support of people in power.

Shiregreen waits…

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

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

Matthew 12:12

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Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

When I visited the Auckland Decorative & Fine Arts Society to give a lecture, my hostess Anne Gambrill picked me up at the airport and swept me off for lunch to the Pah Homestead, which is – as the old V&A advert might have said – a very fine café with an art gallery attached [http://www.pahcafe.co.nz/index.cfm].

The homestead was built for a businessman, James Williamson, in 1877-9, to designs by the father-and-son team Edward (c1824-1895) and Thomas (1855–1923) Mahoney, who also built St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland.

It ceased to be a home as early as 1888, after Williamson’s death, and has been successively used by the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.  Fortunately, although not a stick of furniture remains, the building itself is remarkably intact and rich in plasterwork, joinery, parquet flooring and marble fireplaces.

Auckland City Council purchased it in 2002 to develop it and the surrounding park as an amenity.  As the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, the Pah Homestead opened to the public in August 2010.

It is now the home of the James Wallace Art Trust, which collects and displays contemporary New Zealand art.  Sir James Wallace, who has been collecting since the early 1960s, admitted, “I learned enough trying to paint to know that I was no good at it.”  Instead, he invested massively in young artists:  the result is a “diary collection”, from which nothing has been sold.  There is an entertaining attempt to interview Sir James at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts/news/article.cfm?c_id=544&objectid=10746252.

Of all that was on offer when I visited the Pah, I most enjoyed Matthew 12/12 by Gregor Kregar (b 1972) – seventy-two ceramic sheep, all in woolly jumpers, crowded into one corner of the room by a ceramic sheepdog:  http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O5.html.  You could say it’s a fresh interpretation of New Zealand lamb.

In addition to live sheep [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O2.html, http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O3.html and http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O4.html] Gregor Kregar, who is based in Auckland, also does ceramic pigs [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O7.html] and mongrels [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O6.html].  Perhaps live pigs and mongrels are less biddable than sheep.
 
You can take a virtual tour of the current exhibition at the Pah Homestead at http://wallaceartstrust.org.nz/wallace-art-awards/virtual-gallery.  Indeed, you can change the colour of the walls if you like.

 

Preacher man 1

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Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

John Wesley (1703-1791) is a towering figure in the history of the English church.

He forms part of a huge dynasty of clergymen and poets, the son of the writer Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) and older brother of the hymn-writer Charles Wesley (1707-1788), who wrote ‘Love Divine, all loves excelling’ and the basis for ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’ among much else.

Though he is recognised as one of the founders of the Methodist church, he was in fact an ordained Anglican priest until his death.  He regarded his ministry as additional to, rather than a replacement for, the Established Church.

Dr Samuel Johnson found his energy irritating:  “John Wesley’s conversation is good, but he is never at leisure.  He is always obliged to go at a certain hour.  This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk, as I do.”

This isn’t surprising.  During his long life, his workload as a preacher was prodigious.  One biographer says that he “rode 250,000 miles, gave away 30,000 pounds,…and preached more than 40,000 sermons”.

More often than not, he preached out of doors.  When his followers built their own chapels, he favoured an octagonal plan, of which the best survivor is the Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire (1764).  Originally built as a pure octagon, it was extended in 1802 by lengthening two sides to accommodate regular congregations of over a thousand.

It’s still in use, and visitors are welcome.  It’s a delightful place to be quiet in.  It must be a particularly satisfying space to preach in.  For contact details see http://www.methodistheritage.org.uk/heptonstalloctagonalchapel.htm.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Christmas in a T-shirt: Egypt

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Temple of Ramesses II, Abu Simbel, Egypt

Temple of Ramesses II, Abu Simbel, Egypt

For many years, my summer work in England obliged me to holiday abroad – if at all – at Christmas, and I’ve got used to heading off to exotic locations around the winter solstice.

The first time I chose Egypt I was so beguiled I went back for a second helping.

Egyptology is studied and researched entirely in English, so the local guides are astonishingly fluent, to the extent that on my second tour they invariably addressed our tour-manager, a lady from Essex, as “Na’alie”.

Tourist tours to Egypt tend to follow a pattern:  in Cairo the Pyramids and the Sphinx, together with the Egyptian Museum, are virtually compulsory.  You could hardly not visit them, though not everyone would enjoy the interior of the Great Pyramid, which is rather like Holborn underground with emergency lighting, no ventilation and no escalator.

The Sphinx was smaller than I expected, about half the length of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and I was surprised to find it has a tail.  When you stand level with its paws you notice it’s gazing straight at a Pizza Hut and a Kentucky Fried Chicken operation.

The Egyptian Museum is astonishing, especially if you’ve already seen Tutankhamûn’s modest tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor:  the treasure – case after incredible case of thrones and shrines and beds and a chariot and the mask and two equally rich coffins in gold, lapis lazuli and turquoise – fills half a floor of a building the size of the National Gallery.  There’s no understanding Ancient Egypt, but it’s possible to gain a sense of wonder.

Luxor town made me think of Mabelthorpe with minarets.  Here again, there’s a tourist track – Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Temple of Queen Hapshepsut, the Colossi at Memnon and a disconcerting coach-ride to Dendera, which in the 1990s involved an armed convoy of tour-buses high-tailing across the fields and through sleepy villages for an hour:  a tourist bus was blown up some years previously, after which the locals’ sales-opportunities became extremely limited.

Best of all, though, is the Nile cruise – temples at Esna, Edfu, Kom Ombo and Aswan, the location of the First Cataract.

The town of Aswan is dominated by the astonishing Aswan High Dam, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s great legacy, holding back 111 cubic kilometres of water to irrigate the lands downstream and provide up to half of the country’s electricity.

The highlight of my Egyptian travels was a before-dawn plane-journey from Aswan to Abu Simbel for the awesome experience of being inside the great temple of Ramesses II at the moment of sunrise.

What has always been a great archaeological miracle is now an engineering marvel, for the entire rock-hewn temple was dismantled in 1964-8, moved 200 metres and raised 65 metres away from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam.

I’ve never before or since paid over £100 for a half-day excursion, and I don’t regret a penny of my early-morning odyssey to Abu Simbel.

For the moment Egypt is an uncertain destination for holidaymaking but not completely out of bounds.  The warm and friendly Egyptian people continue, in the manner to which they are accustomed, to welcome visitors to their breathtaking land.

UK Foreign Office advice about travel to Egypt is at http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/middle-east-north-africa/egypt.