Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Timbertop

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (west aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (west aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (east aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (east aspect)

When I came to live in north Sheffield in 1973, the pleasantest place to go for a couple of pints in the evening was Timbertop on Shirecliffe Road at the top of a hill looking out across the Lower Don Valley, then still an expanse of smoking steelworks.

Timbertop was the most exciting and innovative of three 1960s public-house designs by the versatile Sheffield practice, Hadfield, Cawkwell & Davidson.  The others were the Jack in a box, Silkstone Road, Frecheville (1966) and The Domino, Egerton Street (1967, demolished).

Timbertop was commissioned by Bass Charrington (North) Ltd, built in 1969 and opened early in 1970.  It was an adventurous design, taking advantage of its sloping site five hundred feet above sea level.

The load-bearing brick walls support a timber structure, with a roof that presents as a valley on the entrance front and as a pyramid when seen from downhill.

All the service facilities were located in the basement, along with the tenant’s bedrooms;  the tenant’s living accommodation was, unusually, on the ground floor rather than above the public areas.

Customers had a choice of social areas spread over an open-plan split-level space, with a snug at ground level leading to a sunken lounge with a 16ft natural stone fireplace and a chimney breast reaching to the roof, and an upper-level gallery floor with a bar and snack-preparation room.

In harmony with the timber structure, the internal walls were lined with pine, and the ceilings were of cedar wood.

Another interior feature, unusual in Sheffield pubs at the time, was a waterfall.

The building was completed in nine and a half weeks.

The pub was opened by Alderman J W Sterland, who drew the first pint.  As chairman of the city licensing committee, he’d visited a few hostelries in his time and declared it “one of the finest pubs I have seen”.

In later years Timbertop gained an unsavoury reputation and was not the sort of place you’d go for a quiet pint.

There were repeated reports in the local press of “a significant number of incidents on the premises” involving “reports of assaults and drug usage and dealing”.

On one occasion the premises supervisor was attacked when he confronted a customer attempting to serve himself.  Further incidents included a stabbing, paramedics attending a customer who was comatose, assaults involving bottles and “a damaged vehicle with a ‘strong smell of cannabis’”.  The final straw must have come shortly after a shooting that led to a court case in September 2015.

Now the place stands empty, and the chances of it reopening as licensed premises are probably nil.  A car-wash operation occupies the car park.

It’s an exceptional building, in a part of Sheffield that has already lost – or may lose – some of the few landmark structures it ever had – such as the Ritz Cinema (Hadfield & Cawkwell 1937;  demolished 2013) and St Cecilia’s Parish Church (Kenneth B Mackenzie, 1939;  redundant).

Bridlington’s hidden Art Deco gem

Regal Cinema, Bridlington

Regal Cinema, Bridlington

The Cinema Theatre Association is understandably unhappy that Historic England has dismissed the proposal to list the Regal Cinema, Bridlington, for its fine and almost intact Art Deco interior:  http://cinema-theatre.org.uk/our-campaigns/cinemas-at-risk/regal-bridlington-1.  Bingo has kept the place going since films ended in 1971.

Opened on July 28th 1938, the building was designed by Charles Edmund Wilford (1895-1988).  Though the exteriors were different, the interior of the Bridlington Regal was identical to the demolished Regal Cinema, Walton-on-Thames, built at the same date by the same architect for the same owner, Lou Morris.

The façade is dominated by a long, horizontal window which lighted the first-floor café, above four shop units on the ground floor.

The café and the auditorium, which originally seated 1,500 (or 1,489, or 1,355, depending on the source), are distinguished by the ornate Art Deco plasterwork of Eugene Mollo and Michael Egan.

The splay walls on either side of the proscenium figure a filigree pattern of foliage, originally illuminated by concealed lighting, and the geometric shapes at the end of the splays and on the ceiling are decorated with stylised foliage.  The original decorative scheme in silver and gilt was more subtle than the present livelier palette of the bingo club.

The stage is 43 feet wide and deep, with a suite of four dressing rooms, and there was a 3-manual, 6-rank Compton organ which was removed c1968.

The CTA’s Bulletin (January/February 2015) bristles with indignation over the “unclear and unreliable… subjective standard used to adjudge this building” and the “factual errors” in the Historic England rejection of the listing proposal.

Bridlington Borough Council has made a magnificent job of the Spa complex down the road from the Regal.  Let’s hope that imagination, diplomacy and judicious financial management will keep the Regal intact if and when bingo becomes unprofitable.

There is footage of Florence de Jong playing the Regal Compton organ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Dg3LNYGyw.

A club as well

National Liberal Club, London

National Liberal Club, London

Thanks to a Victorian Society visit to the National Liberal Club [http://www.nlc.org.uk], entertainingly led by Ronald Porter who is a member of both Club and Society, I now more fully understand the context of one of my favourite anecdotes about F E Smith, latterly Lord Birkenhead (1872-1930).

The Club was founded in 1882 “to provide a central meeting-place for Metropolitan and provincial Liberals, where all the comforts of life should be attainable at what are called ‘popular prices’” and opened in 1887.

It was located away from London’s traditional clubland on the corner of Northumberland Avenue and the Thames Embankment.  Nowadays its terrace looks across to the London Eye.

Its architect was Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), the great proponent of terra-cotta and faience whose style was derisively termed “slaughterhouse Gothic” by his architect contemporaries.

The National Liberal Club is a huge place even after the bulk of the building, including five floors of bedrooms, was sold in 1985 to become the Royal Horseguards Hotel [http://www.guoman.com/en/hotels/united_kingdom/london/the_royal_horseguards/index.html]. It remains one of the largest private club-houses in the world.

It’s a palatial shrine to comfort, conviviality and the principles of Liberalism.  There are, predictably, more pictures and statues of Mr Gladstone than you can shake a stick at, and portraits of every Liberal worthy, not least the Derby artist Ernest Townsend’s 1915 portrait of Winston Churchill, which for a couple of decades was not displayed after the former Tory-turned-Liberal turned Tory again in 1924.

The building is also a shrine to the extravagant but relatively inexpensive decorative possibilities of glazed brick.  Like Waterhouse’s Victoria Building at what is now Liverpool University, the interiors are predominantly brown and beige, warm and comfortable, and particularly suitable for the then new electric light.

The Tory MP F E Smith (later Lord Birkenhead) used to drop in, while walking between his chambers at the Temple and the Houses of Parliament, to use the gentlemen’s lavatory.  He was eventually approached by the club porter and asked if he was a member, to which he famously replied, “Good God! You mean it’s a club as well?”

When you see the lobby of the National Liberal Club, that story suddenly makes more sense.

Runaway tram

Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 (2014)

Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 (2014)

By a miracle nobody was killed or injured when the Manx Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 inexplicably ran down the mountain on Wednesday March 30th:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/pictures-runaway-mountain-tram-crash-drama-1-7824668.

Someone must have had a heart-stopping moment when they turned round and found their tram had disappeared.

Fortunately there was no-one on board.

Even more fortunately the tram overturned on the bend before it could reach the road-crossing at the Bungalow. 

A road collision at the Bungalow would certainly have been fatal.  

If instead the tram had continued down the line beyond the Bungalow it would have caused even more destruction, whether somebody had had the presence of mind to set the points to run it into the depot or, worst of all, if it had run on into Laxey, over another main road and into the terminus where there are buildings, crowds of people and possibly other trams.

How an empty, parked tram unexpectedly took off down the steep incline isn’t yet explained, but the restoration of the service within three days indicates confidence that the cause is known and can be certainly avoided in future.  This clip from the Isle of Man News gives more detail:  http://manx.net/tv/mt-tv/watch/77830/tram-crash-update.

There has never before been a runway on the Snaefell Mountain Railway in 120 years of operation, though there was one on the Llandudno funicular Great Orme Railway in 1932.

Certainly no 3 is matchwood.  It can’t be restored in any meaningful sense, though like its companion no 5, destroyed by fire in 1970, it could be replaced by a close facsimile, which may include components from the original.

Update:  News articles about the subsequent analyses of this incident make interesting reading:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/isle-of-man-newspapers-wins-freedom-of-information-appeal-over-snaefell-tram-crash-1-8337886 and http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/runaway-tram-had-defective-brakes-1-8337906.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 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.

Café for film-lovers

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Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield:  March 26th 2016

Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield: March 26th 2016

Photos:  Scott Hukins [www.scotthukins.co.uk]

The latest improvement to the Abbeydale Picture House was revealed at the most recent film-revival night on Saturday March 26th.

The back of the stalls has been converted to a superb café-bar with a flat timber floor and dado panelling in keeping with the architecture, and painted in a relaxing cream and beige scheme which highlights the plasterwork and echoes the original 1920 decoration.

It’s an unobtrusive addition to the auditorium and a welcome asset to help the building once more earn its keep.

The film-night showed comedy programmes by two of the greatest figures in silent cinema, Buster Keaton in One Week (1920) and The Goat (1921) and the most famous of Harold Lloyd’s many films, Safety Last! (1923), with a live piano accompaniment by the immensely talented Darius Battiwalla [http://www.dariusbattiwalla.com/Darius_Battiwalla/Home.html].

More power to the Abbeydale’s owner, Phil Robins, and the team that runs the film nights, Rob Hughes, Louise Snape and Ismar Badzic.  They’re bringing the Abbeydale back to life and filling it with an appreciative clientele that’s clearly growing by word of mouth.

And now you can wake up and smell the coffee at the Abbeydale, where the café is open on Fridays and Saturdays, 10.00am-5.00pm:  http://picturehouserevival.tumblr.com.

The flying tram-rail

Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

On the evening of Thursday December 12th 1940 my Auntie Edna, then a teenager, put on her dancing shoes and caught a tram into Sheffield city-centre to go dancing.  No sooner had she got there than the sirens sounded and she spent twelve terrifying hours in a shelter as the shops and public buildings above were bombed and burnt down.

The following morning she tramped the three miles back to the family home in the East End to be greeted by her father with “And where the bloody hell have you been?”

He had, of course, spent the night watching the red sky over the city-centre knowing his daughter was out there in great danger.

The city of Bristol suffered a succession of air-raids, one of which, on Good Friday 1941, permanently put the tram system out of use by severing the main power cable at Counterslip Bridge.  The story goes that the last car to Kingswood was pushed by its passengers until it could freewheel to the depot.

I thought of Granddad panicking about his daughter’s safety when I found a fearsome memento of the Bristol Blitz, and of Bristol’s tramway, in the churchyard of the grand parish church of St Mary Redcliffe, round the corner from Temple Meads Station.

A sizeable length of tramrail remains embedded among the graves where it landed as it flew over the houses from an adjacent road.

You wouldn’t have wanted to be about when debris as heavy as several yards of tramrail was flying around.

No wonder Granddad was so upset, and so relieved to see his daughter bedraggled but in one piece after the Luftwaffe bombed Sheffield.

The Bombed Out Church

St Luke’s Church, Liverpool (1979)

St Luke’s Church, Liverpool (1979)

When I first knew Liverpool in the late 1960s, St Luke’s Church was a blackened, bombed-out ruin with trees growing inside the roofless nave and the clock dials stopped at 3.36am, showing the time on the morning of May 7th 1941 when the flames up the tower brought down the floors, the roof and most of the bells.

I didn’t realise at the time that this poignant memento of the Liverpool blitz was under threat, because Graeme Shankland’s Liverpool City Plan of 1965 proposed an inner ring-road aligned directly on the nave, and would have left the tower as a forlorn waymark.

Shankland’s scheme didn’t happen:  the existing bleak dual carriageways behind the Three Graces and eastwards towards the M62 give an idea of how the city would have been carved up if it had gone ahead.

In the time that St Luke’s stood abandoned people became attached to it as a reminder of what the city suffered in the Second World War.

However, if you leave a ruin as a ruin, sooner or later it falls down.

In fact, St Luke’s is a significant building.  Built by Liverpool Corporation as a parish church that would also serve for civic services, it was designed by the Senior Surveyors, John Foster Snr and his son and successor, John Foster Jnr, perhaps with the help of a shadowy assistant, “Mr Edwards”, in an elaborate version of what modern architectural historians call the “Commissioners’ Gothic” style.

Built on a sloping site which accentuates the height of the 133-foot tower, it has rich architectural detail, with octagonal buttresses rising to elaborate turrets and ogee mouldings over the belfry windows.  It opened for services in 1832, and the scale of the nave and aisles made it a useful space for concerts until the completion of the Philharmonic Hall (1849) and St George’s Hall (1854).

St Luke’s became known as the “Doctors’ Church” because of the large number of medical practitioners and their families from Rodney Street who worshipped there.

The stonework has been cleaned to show the fine carving, but nothing of the interior survives.  In the roofless tower, the cast-iron bell-frame – believed to be the earliest to be built (1828) – remains in situ, and a clock similar to the lost original was found and installed.

The churchyard, which has never been used for burials, was developed as a garden, and now contains Aemonn O’Docherty’s Irish Famine Memorial (1998).

The ruins and the grounds of St Luke’s were opened up by the Liverpool arts and events organisation Urban Strawberry Lunch, and are now cared for by the group Bombed Out Church, which runs events, exhibitions and open-air film shows and concerts to keep alive the city’s blitz memorial.

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

The last bomb site

Former Swan Inn, National Picture Theatre and Jubb’s furniture store, Beverley Road, Hull

Former Swan Inn, National Picture Theatre and Jubb’s furniture store, Beverley Road, Hull

Hull’s Beverley Road is rich in architectural interest, and includes an unprepossessing but astonishing survival:  sandwiched between the former furniture shop of E C Jubb and the former Swan Hotel is the gaunt façade of the former National Picture Theatre, built in 1914 and bombed in an air-raid on the night of March 17th-18th 1941.

The film that night was, ironically, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.  When the sirens sounded the audience of 150 left the auditorium and gathered in the foyer but couldn’t leave the building because of the intensity of the raid.

A direct hit destroyed the screen end of the cinema and brought down the roof, but the front of the building survived and no-one was injured.

The rubble was subsequently cleared away, leaving the façade and the standing remains of the foyer, staircases and the rear of the balcony.  Somehow, the ruins were left untouched from 1941 to the present day.

This shell, “as hit”, is now the only surviving civilian bomb-site remaining from the Second World War:  http://ncww2mt.freewebspace.com/cgi-bin/i/images/hdm-fb-26.7.05.jpg.  Of the other fourteen bomb-sites, twelve are ecclesiastical and one lies within a naval dockyard.

When local people, particularly the customers of the Swan Hotel next door, began to appreciate its rarity they formed the National Civilian WW2 Memorial Trust, and persuaded English Heritage to award the ruin Grade II listing.

With support from English Heritage, Hull City Council is considering making a Compulsory Purchase Order to retain the National Picture Theatre as an intact memento of the nightmare of enemy action, not only in Hull but across Britain:  http://ncww2mt.freewebspace.com/index.html.

Trafalgar Street Church

Trafalgar Street Church, Beverley Road, Hull

Trafalgar Street Church, Beverley Road, Hull

When I was a student in Hull in the late 1960s, I regularly trundled up and down Beverley Road on the top deck of a bus without taking the slightest notice of the streetscape.

Now, fifty years later, I’ve walked the length of Beverley Road from town to the Cottingham Road junction to check what notable buildings survived.

One interesting relic is the Trafalgar Street Church, a curious turn-of-the-century Baptist church with distinctive free Gothic façades of flint with red-brick dressings and a quirky corner tower with an octagonal turret, designed by the London architect George Baines (1852-1934).

Opened in 1906, it served its original congregation until 1938 and then became nondenominational.  It had closed by 2002 and the adjacent Sunday School has since been converted to flats.

The interior of the chapel, though decayed by water ingress, appears to be intact – a light, interesting galleried space with transepts, aisles and a fake hammer-beam roof:  http://www.trafalgar-church.co.uk/Photographs.

The Friends of Trafalgar Street Church group is campaigning to convert the church to a productive modern use but does not own the building:  http://www.trafalgar-church.co.uk.

As a Grade II listed building and a landmark within the Beverley Road Conservation Area, a gateway into the city centre, the Trafalgar Street Church deserves a future.

Sheffield Central

Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Sheffield’s self-confessed mapaholic, Mike Spick, does a very fine presentation about mapping Sheffield.  It was strongly recommended to me by a friend, and I caught it at a Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group meeting in January 2016.

One map in particular that Mike showed alerted me to a piece of Sheffield history I’d never heard of before.

A plan of c1890-1895 showed a scheme to link Sheffield’s two competing railways, the Midland and what was then the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, at a combined triangular station to be called Sheffield Central.

The gradients apparently would have been demanding, because the MS&L (from 1896 renamed the Great Central Railway) runs on a viaduct at the point where the Midland burrows beneath it in a cutting.

Clearly the project came to nothing and as far as I know is not mentioned in published histories, but its chronology explains why the Midland Railway brought in their house architect Charles Trubshaw to double the size of their station in 1905, while the Great Central built a new frontage to Sheffield Victoria in 1908.

The site of the unbuilt triangular station is now occupied by the delta junction which connects the three lines of Sheffield Supertram at Park Square.