Monthly Archives: October 2024

Leeds’ secret garden

Leave a Reply
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds

After a day out in Manchester where we enjoyed the Castlefield Viaduct high-line garden, my friend Ann and I decided to take a day-trip to Leeds to look at the Monk Bridge Viaduct, which turns out to be a closely-guarded secret.

It’s remarkably difficult to find:  there seems to be no signage whatsoever, and street maps show where an abandoned railway crosses the River Aire but offer no indication how to approach the elevated former trackbed.

If we’d simply walked out of the station and turned left we’d have found it within a spacious housing development called The Junction.  But we’re from Sheffield.  How are we supposed to know?

The viaduct is worth seeking out, nevertheless, as a monument to the period when the new-fangled railways embellished their engineering with grand architectural decoration.

From 1834 onwards five separate railway companies converged on the flat land beside the River Aire as near as possible to the centre of Leeds, their approach lines criss-crossing and twisting in a cat’s-cradle over the river and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

The Midland Railway opened a terminus, Leeds Wellington Station, in 1846, while the other four companies shared a joint station, Leeds Central Station, in 1854 and built an east-west through line served by Leeds New Station in 1869 (renamed Leeds City in 1938).

In the 1960s British Railways concentrated all its passenger services in Leeds City (renamed simply Leeds) and subsequently Leeds Central was demolished and part of its viaduct approach replaced by Royal Mail House (1975 – reconstructed as West Central, 2003, and later West Point).

The surviving viaduct, including a stately bridge over the River Aire, has now become the spine of The Junction, a very smart residential development geared to people who work from home, and the former trackbed is ingeniously landscaped so that it doesn’t look like a corridor to carry railway lines.

Ann and I parked ourselves at a table in front of The Junc Shack, where a civilised queue of (presumably) residents and workers seemed content to wait for carefully prepared and courteously served food and drinks from Alfonso’s Cuban Shack, where the generously filled pastrami bagel proved to be a substitute for lunch.

On a fine day, within ten minutes’ walk of Leeds Station, The Junction is worth visiting. 

If you ask the Junc Shack crew nicely, they’ll show you how to access the splendid loos.

Exploring Turin:  Duomo

Leave a Reply
Turin Cathedral, Italy: Chapel of the Holy Shroud

The Cathedral of St John the Baptist (Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista, Duomo di Torino) is worth visiting for the sake of an object that’s hardly ever seen – the Holy Shroud (Sacra Sindone).

The church interior is not particularly ornate.  The nave is plain, with Doric piers supporting round arches, the bulk of it built very quickly between 1491 and 1498 alongside a slightly older brick bell tower.  There is, however, a sequence of spectacularly Baroque side chapels, a huge organ case aloft in a transept, and a shrine to the twentieth-century Catholic local hero Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925), due to be canonised in the centenary of his death from polio.

The domed Chapel of the Holy Shroud (1668-94) fills the space between the east end of the Cathedral and the adjacent Royal Palace. 

The story of the revered relic it was built to contain is unrecorded before 1354, when it was exhibited in the French town of Lirey about a hundred miles east of Paris.

It came into the possession of the Royal House of Savoy in 1453,  and was kept in the royal chapel at the Savoyard capital, Chambéry.  There it sustained fire-damage in 1532, and it was transferred to the new capital of Savoy, Turin, in 1578.

Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (1634-1675) commissioned priest, engineer and mathematician Camillo Guarino Guarini (1624-1683), to complete the elaborate chapel that had been planned by his predecessor, Charles Emmanuel I “the Great”, Duke of Savoy (1562-1630). 

The floor of the Shroud Chapel is raised so that the interior Is visible from the nave, and both public pilgrims and royal visitors could gain access to the chapel on separate occasions.  Crowned by Guarini’s dome, a masterpiece of engineering, the Chapel was consecrated by the architect in 1680, but was only completed after his death.  It was finally ready to receive the Shroud in 1694.

At the time of the 1898 exposition of the Shroud it was photographed for the first time by an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia (1855-1941), who was astonished that the negative image provided detail invisible to the naked eye.

Following a fire in 1997, the Shroud is currently stored in a temperature- and humidity-controlled case in a side-chapel. 

Since 1998, the 500th anniversary of the Cathedral’s consecration, the Shroud has been shown much more frequently than before, in 2000, 2010, 2015 and (by live stream because of Covid) at Easter 2020.

At all other times visitors are invited to sit in front of a digital image of Christ’s face, an opportunity that is treated with the greatest respect.  Even the bambini fall quiet.

I respect the views of scientists who say the Shroud’s herringbone weave postdates the time of Christ, that the images are painted with identifiable colour agents such as iron oxide, and so on, but I also sense that we can’t possibly know the significance of this piece of fabric. 

There’s an ethereal quality about the image that defies logic, and hosts of visitors to Turin gaze with awe at what may be the face of their Redeemer.

Brunel’s starting point

Leave a Reply
Paddington Station, London

It’s one thing to learn from the standard book about a historic building, but walking round it with the author provides a different level of understanding.

Steven Brindle’s Paddington Station: its history and architecture (English Heritage 2013) in its second edition represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of one of Britain’s most important stations.

I took the opportunity to walk round the station with Steven as part of a group of Victorian Society members on a Saturday afternoon amid the hubbub of trains arriving and departing every few minutes, high-volume PA announcements, assistance trolleys conveying people up and down the platforms and noisy families taking selfies in front of the statue of Paddington Bear.

Now the second busiest station in the UK (after London Liverpool Street), Paddington Station remains a monument to the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) who was chosen to plan and build the Great Western Railway after winning the competition to design the Clifton Suspension Bridge and making himself popular with Bristol grandees for assisting in managing the chaos caused by the Reform Bill riots of 1831.

Steven made the station’s original layout clear by starting his tour halfway down Platform 1, next to Marcus Cornish’s statue of Paddington Bear. 

This was the side from which the first trains departed, and the buildings planned by Brunel and designed by Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820-1877) largely survive, including the Royal Waiting Room, now the first-class lounge.

Brunel ensured that the Great Western Railway was at the forefront of Victorian technology though some of his ideas were in advance of practicality:  the seven-foot broad gauge finally expired in 1892 and his atmospheric railway lasted less than a year.  Nevertheless, trains still run between Paddington and the South-West as they have since 1838, from under the magnificent glazed train-shed that Brunel and Wyatt completed in 1854. 

Three spans of wrought-iron arches cover the tracks, supported by columns that were originally cast iron, replaced by steel in 1922-24.  The transepts which break up the vista were thought to accommodate turntable tracks for shifting early rolling stock, but thorough recent research casts doubt on this idea.

The Great Western Railway was at once innovative and conservative, so when the removal of the broad-gauge tracks made it possible to increase the number of platforms it was accomplished without compromising Brunel and Wyatt’s train shed.

I’d never fully grasped how the separation of the original four departure and arrival platforms worked until I followed Steven round and learned that Brunel’s buildings on the northern arrival side were demolished in the early twentieth century.

The north side of the station has been repeatedly altered, first with the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway terminus, tucked in the north-west corner, in 1863, then the Span Four extension (1913-14), which respectfully follows the proportions of the 1854 station, and again when new buildings were added by the company architect, Percy Emerson Culverhouse (1871-1953), in the 1930s.

In the course of its history the station has extended from four platforms to seventeen including through platforms for the Underground and the Elizabeth Line.

Steven Brindle couldn’t show us the most remarkable of his discoveries at Paddington Station, the remaining span of Brunel’s first iron bridge, over the canal at Bishop’s Bridge.   The actual ironwork is in store in Fort Cumberland near Portsmouth.  The story is at Bishop’s Bridge – Wikipedia.

L T C Rolt relates that at an early meeting of the Great Western Railway directors, someone cast doubts on the practicality of driving a railway all the way from London to Bristol, and Brunel replied, “Why not make it longer, and have a steamboat go from Bristol to New York and call it the Great Western?”

You can take a train from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads, passing the Wharncliffe Viaduct, the Maidenhead Bridge, Sonning Cutting, Swindon and Box Tunnel – each of them a pioneering work of genius – to visit Brunel’s surviving steamship, SS Great Britain, in the dry dock in which she was built.

He was a truly remarkable man who lived a remarkable life.