I was walking along a back street, Luisenstraße, in the little German town of Wuppertal on a bright spring morning when I first stumbled, as the artist intended, upon an example of a Stolperstein, which literally translates as “stumbling stone”.
The expression metaphorically refers to a “stumbling block”
– one of Gunter Demnig’s many brass pavement setts installed across Europe to
commemorate victims of the Holocaust, memorialised at their last freely chosen
place of residence.
Here are four together, stating simply “Hier wohnte…” [Here lived…] Emil and Henriette Hirschberg, ermordet [murdered] in Minsk, and Samuel
and Sophie Zuckermann, ermordet
respectively in Chelmno and Auschwitz.
There are now over seventy thousand of these poignant reminders,
deliberately designed to trip up the unthinking passer-by, from Spain to Greece
and from Poland to Sicily.
There were two outside my 1950s Berlin hotel in the heavily
bombed area of Friedrichshain, and I found another on a pavement in the modern
development that replaces the bombed wastes of Potsdamer Platz, where the
course of the Berlin Wall created a dead zone that lasted a generation after
the war ended.
I spotted another, in Budapest, embedded in the pavement of
what had been the Jewish Quarter but which became, at the end of 1944, the
ghetto. Here the last fragment of the
ghetto wall was dismantled in 2006 but a reproduction, using some original
stone, was erected as a memorial two years later.
Gunter Demnig’s work is much less likely to be obliterated, even if a few setts are discarded, and there can never be too many reminders of the mass murders of 1933-45.
It’s idle to believe that such a crime could never happen
again.
I carry with me the last line of Bertholt Brecht’s 1941
play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: “The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
Former Refuge Assurance Headquarters, Manchester (now Principal Hotel): porte-cochère
The
magnificent former Manchester headquarters of the Refuge Assurance Company is a fitting symbol of the city’s
nineteenth-century prestige and prosperity, an extravagant temple to the
virtues of thrift and frugality.
The Refuge Friend in Deed Life Assurance & Sick Fund Friendly Society was founded in 1858 by James Proctor and George Robins of Dukinfield, near Stalybridge, east of Manchester. By the late nineteenth century their society based on saving for the future had expanded to the extent that it needed a prominent headquarters in Manchester city centre.
For commercial buildings the architect, Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), favoured the use of moulded glazed or unglazed brick to create rich decorative effects at less expense than ashlar and carved stonework. Some of his best public buildings in Manchester were built in stone – the Assize Courts (1859-64, demolished) and the Town Hall (1868-77) – though Strangeways Prison (1868) is brick with stone dressings.
Elsewhere, his attachment to terracotta, and its tin-glazed derivative, faience, gained prominence after he designed the Natural History Museum, South Kensington (1873-80) and became widely recognised by his work for the Prudential Assurance Company at their London headquarters at Holborn Bars (1895-1901) and at instantly recognisable branch offices across the nation.
These terracotta buildings were satirised as “slaughterhouse Gothic”, which is unfair, partly because most of them are in other styles than Gothic, but furthermore because, though the outside elevations were deep red, the interiors were invariably varied and colourful, and could be kept bright because they were practically washable.
Alfred
Waterhouse’s original building for the Refuge Assurance Company in central
Manchester, on the corner of Oxford Street and Whitworth Street, was started in
1891 and completed in 1895.
The architect’s son, Paul Waterhouse, continued the Oxford Street elevation, including the 217-foot clock tower, in 1910-12. Both designs are an eclectic mix of French Renaissance style with baroque features, liberally embellished with emblems such as the bee, symbolising Manchester’s industry, and the initial ‘R’ for ‘Refuge’.
The company
owned the land further along Whitworth Street, where India House (1906), Lancaster
House (1905-10) and Asia House,
Princess Street (1906-9) were built, leaving room on Whitworth Street for a
further extension of the Refuge headquarters, designed in harmony with the
existing building by Stanley Birkett (1884-1959) in 1932.
The Refuge
Assurance Company left Manchester in 1987 for a purpose-built site at Fulshaw
Hall, Cheshire. The Manchester building
was considered as a replacement home for the Hallé Orchestra but instead the
orchestra moved directly from the Free Trade Hall to the Bridgewater Hall in 1996.
Instead, the
Refuge building was converted into a 271-room hotel which also opened in
1996. It was named the Palace after the
theatre on the opposite corner of Whitworth Street. The hotel was reconfigured, with conference
facilities separated in the 1932 Excalibur Building, and rebranded the
Principal in 2016.
The main
features of the Waterhouse buildings of 1891-95 and 1910-12 are the porte-cochère,
originally open until the dome was inserted in 1996, the open-plan office space and the clock
tower, its faces embellished with the Manchester bee.
Within, the
private directors’ staircase, decorated
with Cararra marble and a bronze balustrade and embellished with stained-glass
coats of arms of the cities and boroughs where the company did business, leads
to the director’s boardroom.
The Stanley
Birkett building respects its older neighbour, but the interior colour-palette
is toned down to white, and the decorative features tend towards moderne in style.
The Refuge
building featured in the climax of the 1960 Hammer film, Hell is a City, written and directed by Val Guest. An analysis of the locations used is at https://www.reelstreets.com/films/hell-is-a-city.
Tours of the Principal Hotel are provided by Jonathan Schofield, a professional tour-guide and author who knows Manchester like the back of his hand, tells good stories well, and has a voice that cuts through the city’s traffic noise like a bandsaw: https://www.jonathanschofieldtours.com/exclusive-the-principal-hotel.html.
At the King’s Cross end of the Caledonian Road stands Keystone Crescent, the London crescent with the tightest radius and the only one in which the inner and the outer terraces have identical facades.
It was built as Caledonian Terrace in 1846, at a time when the surrounding district was first developed as middle-class housing, which rapidly went down the social scale because of the industries which grew along the River Fleet and, most of all, because of the noise and smoke of the surrounding railways.
The area has been transformed by the arrival of Eurostar, and the tiny two-storey houses with a basement and an attic have increased in value tenfold since the 1990s. They currently come on the market at over a million pounds.
The front gardens have been given over to hard standing for cars, but otherwise the crescent’s conservation-area status maintains its attractive appearance, a few steps away from the bustle of one of north London’s traffic arteries.
Keystone Crescent boasts its own basement club [http://www.keystonecrescent.com], founded by Kristie Bishop and Coralie Sleap, who also operate Drink, Shop & Do [http://drinkshopdo.co.uk], “a quirky multi-faceted cafe, bar and shop” a few yards away down the Caledonian Road.
The area of London we now know as King’s Cross was until the early nineteenth century called Battlebridge, commemorating the tradition that it was the site of Queen Boudicea’s defeat in AD60-61. (A more recent and tenuous tradition asserts that the queen is buried beneath platforms 9 and 10 of King’s Cross Station.)
The original “king’s cross” was a bombastic memorial to King George IV, sited at the junction of Grays Inn Road, York Way, Euston Road and Pentonville Road. It was built in 1836 and though it lasted only nine years because it obstructed the traffic the name King’s Cross has stuck ever since.
The name Battlebridge survives at a canal basin on the Regent’s Canal, now a desirable mooring and the home of the London Canal Museum [http://www.canalmuseum.org.uk/index.html], which occupies a former ice warehouse on New Wharf Road.
The museum has two equally important themes – waterways and ice. It’s the only dedicated waterways museum in London, and it’s probably the only place to learn about the once-important ice industry that vanished in the face of mechanised ice manufacture after the Second World War.
It was an ingenious trade, meshed with the Norwegian timber trade. During the winter ice was cut by the loggers who chopped timber in the warmer months, and carried to London in March in the freighters than brought the timber later in the year.
The ice was brought from Limehouse on the Regent’s Canal, loaded and unloaded by metal devices called ice dogs, and stored in cavernous ice wells, much like the icehouses on country estates but rather bigger, built in 1857 and 1862.
The filled wells were insulated by sawdust, an otherwise useless by-product of the timber trade.
The enterprise on New Wharf Road was run by Carlo Gatti (1817-1878), an Italian-speaking Swiss who is credited with introducing ice cream as a popular luxury.
His carts delivered raw ice to restaurants, butchers, fishmongers, hospitals and domestic users.
He also developed a chain of ice-cream parlours and diversified into music halls before returning to Switzerland for a wealthy retirement in the early 1870s.
His warehouse continued in use until at least 1902.
The London Canal Museum, opened in 1992, is small but rich in interest. The ground floor shows one of the two original wells, and the space above, originally stables which the horses accessed up a steep ramp, has comprehensive displays and film clips that explain and bring to life London’s waterways.
It’s a little-known gem, within five minutes’ walk of King’s Cross and St Pancras stations, and a visit will take at least an hour.
Sheffield’s Old Town Hall, on Waingate, has stood empty and unmaintained for over twenty years. As far back as 2007 it figured on the Victorian Society’s annual list of endangered buildings, and it’s more recently been added to SAVE Britain’s Heritage Buildings at Risk register.
Eventually, in August this year, a planning application was
posted proposing a solution to the dilemma of what to do with this huge public
building with its sensitive interiors.
The new owner, Mr Efekoro Omu, is already refurbishing the long-neglected Cannon public house on Castle Street.
Mr Omu’s company, Aestrom OTH, plans to clean and restore
the exterior of the Old Town Hall, and intends to strip out much of the listed
interior to provide twelve serviced apartments, twelve “pod” hotel rooms in the
old cells and, on the basement and lower ground-floor levels, a “souk” – “a
boutique marketplace of characterful commercial spaces” of 918 square metres
(equal to 3½ tennis courts).
The Friends of the Old Town Hall, an energetic group of volunteers who have been monitoring the building since 2014, applauded the arrival of someone actually prepared to take on the building but were highly critical of the proposed alterations to the interior.
Mr Omu’s scheme threatens to obliterate the three most
impressive courtroom spaces and compromise the Waiting Hall area, making the
interior as a whole unreadable as a former courthouse.
There’s no doubt that any historic building has to earn its
own keep. In this case, the current
scheme prioritises commercial necessity above historic integrity.
Some parts the Old Town Hall complex, especially the 1955
extension, lend themselves to radical alteration because their historic value
is inconsiderable.
The earlier interiors, dating back to the nineteenth century
with some later alterations, need more tactful treatment.
Sheffield can boast of a number of practical, attractive, sensitive refurbished historic buildings within a couple of minutes’ walk of the Old Town Hall, such as the Old Post Office in Fitzalan Square and the former bank that is now the Curzon Cinema on George Street.
The Planning Committee of Sheffield City Council meets on
November 19th to decide whether to approve this application concerning a major
public building in an area of the city that’s subject to radical redevelopment.
Let’s hope that the Committee gives Mr Omu every encouragement to think again in more depth about how to revive the Old Town Hall, which deserves a better fate than to become a historic shell.
Concern over inequality and the power of huge corporations
is nothing new. At the end of the
nineteenth century the richest 1% of the American population owned 51% of the
nation’s wealth.
One of the most powerful of the “robber barons” (or
“captains of industry”, depending on your viewpoint) was J Pierpont Morgan
(1837-1914) who amassed great wealth by consolidating already large enterprises
into conglomerates – General Electric, International Harvester and the United
States Steel Corporation.
In the financial emergency now known as the Panic of 1907
the United States government had, for lack of a central bank, to rely on Morgan
to pull together enough support from his fellow financiers to keep the economy
afloat.
When he wasn’t making money, J P Morgan took to spending it
on great art, amassing a spectacular collection of books, manuscripts,
paintings and objets d’art which his
son, J Pierpont Morgan Jnr (known as Jack, 1867-1943), endowed as a public
institution.
Ever since my first visit to New York in 1981 I’ve been familiar with the Frick Collection, the Fifth Avenue villa that houses the treasures amassed by Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), but I only recently found the Morgan collection thanks to a Time Out 101-things-to-do-in-New-York feature.
The Morgan Library & Museum occupies the site of J P Morgan’s small colony of brownstone houses off Madison Avenue in Manhattan. He had bought a townhouse at 219 Madison Avenue at 36th Street as a family home in 1882, and commissioned from the architect Charles F McKim (1847-1909) a purpose-built library extension next door, completed in 1906. (J P Morgan also bought, in 1903 and 1904 respectively, the two adjacent brownstones, one to demolish for a garden, the other as a residence for his son Jack.)
The 1906 library building is a Palladian design in Tennessee
marble, linked to the 1928 annex which Jack Morgan built on the site of his
father’s townhouse and to the surviving mid-nineteenth century brownstone by the
Expansion of 2006 – three glass pavilions and an atrium by Renzo Piano, the
architect of London’s Shard.
The core of the museum is the McKim building – three main
rooms, one a triple-decker library, linked by a rotunda. It was here that Pierpont Morgan corralled his
banking colleagues in 1907, literally locking them in until they agreed on a
rescue package to safeguard the financial system.
J P Morgan’s policy of acquiring great art with a
significant story attached was continued after his death by his librarian,
Belle da Costa Greene (1883-1950), a light-skinned woman of colour who was
enormously influential in the New York art world.
This is why the collection embraces illuminated manuscripts,
incunabula and Near Eastern cylinder seals, alongside the drafts of Bob Dylan’s
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’.
Within a few paces I examined the manuscript of a symphony
by the teenage Mozart corrected by his father, Dr Johnson’s handwriting, a
first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma
and a Gutenberg Bible.
Hard-headed business dealings paid for this
fabulous treasure house of art and human talent, accessible to the public simply
by walking in from the street.
A chance feature in Lincolnshire Life in 1968 led me on my Lincolnshire Road Car Company staff bus-pass to another remote country house not far from Cadeby Hall – the Italianate fantasy of Grainsby Hall, which clearly bemused Henry Thorold in his Lincolnshire Houses book and was dismissed by Pevsner as “crazy”.
I didn’t think the place at all crazy; in fact, I rather liked it.
It was wilfully asymmetrical, with a tower over the entrance
portico and lots of stark plate glass windows which, in 1968, were largely
intact.
When I revisited by car a couple of years later, the windows
– and, I think, the door – had gone and I was free to take pictures of the shattered
and clearly dangerous interior, which included a grand octagonal drawing room
and a massive galleried staircase hall.
This Italianate confectionery dated from 1860 and was built around an earlier, eighteenth-century house.
The Haigh family has owned the Grainsby estate since it came
to William Haigh of Norland, Halifax, by marriage in 1827. In the nineteenth century the family owned
the Garden Street Mill in Halifax.
The Hall must have been a splendid place but it was occupied
by the military during World War II and fell into disrepair.
For a time it was used as a grain store, until it became
dangerous.
It quickly became beyond saving, even between the dates of
my two visits, and it was duly demolished in February 1973.
The c1820 stable block remains and is listed Grade II.
I recently read Henry Thorold’s Lincolnshire Houses (Michael Russell 1999), an extensive compendium of domestic buildings in a huge, empty, varied county, ranging from great palaces like Grimsthorpe and Harlaxton to tiny rectories and houses hidden in the Wolds, quite a few of which were built, bought or inherited by Henry Thorold’s relatives over the past four centuries.
It reminded me of when I first got to know Lincolnshire in the late 1960s, working on the buses in Skegness during university vacations, and travelling the county on a quarter-fare staff bus pass.
In those days there was, of course, no easy way to find information about historic buildings in the county, except the local library, the 1964 first edition Pevsner for Lincolnshire, and the periodical Lincolnshire Life.
A few brief paragraphs in Lincolnshire Life alerted me to Cadeby Hall, up in the Wolds near Ludborough, on the way to Grimsby.
Even the later 1979 Pevsner gives the place short shrift – “an
early C18 stone front of seven bays and 2½ storeys…inside, a good staircase…at
the time of writing derelict…”
The inimitable Henry Thorold calls it “the Sleeping Beauty house par excellence”.
When I first saw it in 1968 it was already derelict, with a ‘Danger Keep Out’ notice on the front door. At the rear a service wing which I then thought to be Victorian but now know to have been eighteenth century had been demolished. I didn’t attempt to enter.
The Hall is easily visible from a public footpath but it’s not a
place you’d come across on your way anywhere.
I found it again driving round north Lincolnshire in 1982, by
which time it had been tidied up and was apparently in use as a shooting lodge.
Now, by the magic of Google, I discover that it has been
splendidly refurbished with, on the site of the demolished rear wing, a
tactful, decorous neo-Georgian extension:
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4163107.
I’ve no idea who lives there: they’re lucky, and we’re lucky that they’ve saved a hidden gem.
In the German city of Wuppertal, birthplace of aspirin, the town hall, the splendid Rathaus, was opened in 1900 by Kaiser Wilhelm II on the same day as the celebrated Schwebebahn.
In front of it stands the jolly Jubiläumsbrunnen fountain, sculpted by the Düsseldorf sculptor Leo
Müsch (1846-1911) to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Elberfelder Verschönerungsverein [the Elberfeld beautification club].
Müsch’s design, 11.5 metres high, carved in red sandstone,
is a glorious riot of sea gods and monsters, tritons and mermaids, topped by
the figure of Neptune.
Quite what this maritime composition has to do with a
landlocked industrial valley in the heart of North Rhine-Westphalia escapes me.
According to the English translation of the Wikipedia
article, the inauguration in 1901 caused a stir because “the figures were too
much male distinctive”.
The “form of the anatomically correctly modelled pubic region”
caused great offence, and an unknown person or persons took a hammer and chisel
to the sculpture.
The community was divided, and strong positions were taken.
The local writer Walter Bloem (1868-1951) wrote a four-act drama The Jubilee Fountain which provoked his pastor to ask him to leave the church.
The City Council eventually resolved to restore Neptune’s
masculinity, after a vehement debate about acanthus leaves.
Nevertheless, as the English translation remarks, “the scars
are still visible today”.
I didn’t notice anything outstanding when I photographed the
fountain.
When I looked closer at my photograph I recalled the lady who, when annoyed by a flasher in a Marks & Spencer elevator, remarked “Is that it, then?”
Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of William Henry Crossland (1823-1909)Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873)
When I planned my 2019 Manchester’s Heritage tour I
knew I couldn’t include Manchester’s magnificent Town Hall because it’s closed
for a five-year refurbishment.
However, there’s more to “Manchester” than Manchester, and a
tram-ride away from St Peter’s Square terminates close to Rochdale
Town Hall, smaller, but hardly less magnificent than Manchester Town Hall,
with a host of entertaining stories attached to it.
No sooner had the new borough of Rochdale elected its first
Corporation in 1856 than a sub-committee began work to provide a suitable town
hall.
The committee chairman, George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873), was
originally unenthusiastic about the project.
When the Church Commissioners eventually agreed a price for land
alongside the River Roch, Ashworth tried unsuccessfully to limit the budget to
£15,000, on the grounds that it was “…only requisite that we should have a
handsome frontage.”
An architectural competition, stipulating a budget limit of
£20,000, was won by the Leeds architect William Henry Crossland (1823-1909), a
pupil of the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott.
Despite the budget-limit, Crossland’s initial estimate of £26,510
was repeatedly augmented at the Corporation’s request. The Great Hall was increased in area to 90ft
× 56ft, and the 240ft tower was embellished with an octagonal lantern decorated
with carved trumpeting angels and surmounted by a spire supporting a solid wood
statue of St George and the Dragon by Earp of London.
Several ancient buildings were demolished and the River Roch
culverted to provide the impressive seventy-foot-wide esplanade.
Crossland provided grand public rooms, the Mayor’s suite,
administrative offices and, initially, the public library, and the west wing
was given to the fire and police departments, together with a court room and
ancillary cells and a residence for the Chief Constable.
The building is faced with millstone grit from Blackstone Edge, generously
dignified by sculpture. The fire
department, for example, was identified with the phoenix, the salamander, the
owl (symbolising watchfulness) and the dog (indicating alarm-raising). For reasons that are unrecorded, a buttress
on the porte-cochère is ornamented
with a winged pig.
The interior was no less extravagant. The entrance hall, designed as a
wool-merchants’ exchange though never used as such, has a heraldic Minton tiled
floor. The windows of the vast staircase
are filled with lancet windows showing the arms of the counties, towns and
ports with which Rochdale traded, together with the technological marvels of
the day – the steamship, the railway and the telegraph.
The Great Hall is lit by windows depicting every English monarch
from William the Conqueror to William IV, together with Oliver Cromwell as Lord
Protector; Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert are portrayed in the rose windows at each end. On the eastern wall is Henry Holiday’s fresco
of the signing of Magna Carta, and the hammer beams support carved angels, from
which originally hung chandeliers.
The magistrates’ retiring room has depictions of nine English
figures associated with lawmaking and the English constitution. The Mayor’s Parlour is decorated with the
Garden of the Hesperides, the four seasons, the months of the year and a group
of musicians. The committee room frieze
shows animals associated, in one way or another, with primitive clothing, and the
walls of the arched council chamber are decorated with a ground of bursting
cotton pods and teasels, and panels showing weaving, spinning, textile-printing,
the plants used in textile manufacture and the inventions of Kay, Cartwright,
Hargreaves and Crompton.
In No 3 Committee Room the corbels show the supporters of the Town
Hall scheme, deftly described by Colin Cunningham, in Victorian and
Edwardian Town Halls (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981): “…the architect wearily toying with a pair of
dividers and the mayor clutching his new town hall”.
By the time the Town Hall was completed in 1871, the final cost
was £154,755 9s 11d, and the Mayor, G L Ashworth, remarked that “we cannot have
beauty without paying for it.”
Dry rot in the spire was being treated when the tower burnt down in 1883. One local legend declares that the fire was deliberately started by the workmen, who feared for their own safety as they took apart the rotten structure. Another legend has it that the Rochdale fire brigade, which was stationed at the back of the building, was beaten to the blaze by the Oldham brigade.
The more modest but still impressive 191ft-high replacement was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of Manchester Town Hall, and completed in 1887.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, including a section on Rochdale, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
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