Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

The new Adelphi

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Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe, Sheffield: balcony plasterwork (1982)
Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe: balcony (2023) [© Dan Bultin]

Sheffield has only two listed cinema buildings, both coincidentally opened in 1920 – the Abbeydale Picture House, designed as a multi-purpose entertainment venue with a full theatre stage, a ballroom, a billiard saloon and a café, and the Adelphi, Attercliffe, a straightforward silent-movie house which at the time of listing in 1996 was largely intact inside and out.

At present the Abbeydale is in a state of limbo.  Problems with the auditorium ceiling have led to a legal stand-off between the landlord and the lessee which needs to be resolved to safeguard the integrity of the building and enable a full restoration to take place.

There has been a flurry of media attention about the Adelphi, which was purchased by Sheffield City Council in March 2023 for refurbishment as a mixed-use cultural space, much needed for the revival and transformation of the local community. The Adelphi is on the market, with a promise of Levelling Up funding to make it once again “occupiable”:  Levelling Up: Adelphi Cinema in Attercliffe out to market (sheffnews.com).

A very attractive CGI image shows what the interior might look like after refurbishment, yet nowhere in the media coverage is there any indication that the original 1920 decoration has completely disappeared.

The auditorium in its current state is a bleak contrast to how it looked at the time it was surveyed for listing, with “pilasters, segment-arched panelled ceiling and [a] moulded proscenium arch with [a] central crest flanked by torches [and a] U-shaped gallery with [a] latticework plaster front”.  The original scheme was delicate and light:  Searching Picture Sheffield;  Searching Picture Sheffield.

The listing inspector observed that “cinemas dating from this period, between 1918 and the introduction of sound in the early 1930s, are comparatively rare”.

What happened? 

I e-mailed a city councillor who will be in a position to know (or find out) but I’ve so far received no response.

I photographed the interior in 1982 when it was a bingo club and again in 1990 when it was unoccupied.  At the time the entire auditorium was bristling with classical plaster decoration designed by the architect William Carter Fenton (1861-1950;  Lord Mayor 1922).

A cluster of urban-explorer reports in 2011 suggests that conversion to a night-club was largely respectful of the building’s listed status, despite the need for structural alterations.

The building was sold for storage use in 2013 and at some point the plasterwork was stripped out.

Recent images show a bleak space that looks nothing like a 1920s cinema.  The CGI image represents an admirable exercise in making the best of a bad job, apart from the puny chandeliers.

Maybe there was a legitimate reason to take down the plasterwork:  perhaps it was unstable and might have injured someone.  Maybe the owner at the time discussed the matter with the Council planning authority, but I’ve never heard any public mention of alterations in the years after the listing.

Though the Adelphi deserves to retain its Grade II listing because its fine exterior survives intact, it now bears no comparison with the Abbeydale, and there are other Sheffield cinemas with surviving interior features which haven’t been considered for protection:

And if the stripping of the auditorium plasterwork was unauthorised, should there not be consequences for a flagrant disregard of the laws about listed buildings?

Monumental cemetery

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Cimitero Monumentale, Milan, Italy: monument to the family of Francesco Podreider (1830-1894), by Domenico Ghidoni (1857-1920) – ‘Christ cleansing the Temple’

Milan’s Monumental Cemetery [Cimitero Monumentale di Milano], designed by Carlo Maciachini (1818-1899), is one of a number of magnificent Italian burial sites that far outclass even the major British examples.

This vast valhalla extends to 250,000 square metres.  The main section, predominantly Catholic as one would expect, was opened in 1866 and the Jewish section was added in 1872 and extended in 1913.  Non-Catholic gentiles are buried in a third area.

Tripadvisor recommends giving an hour to a location that would be difficult to explore thoroughly in less than a day without a guide or guide-book.  It’s an architectural and artistic buffet, and wandering is like going to Harrod’s food hall looking for a snack.

Facing the spacious entrance piazza, the Famedio (1887), a huge hall of fame in “Neo-Medieval” style, contains the remains of many of Milan’s most prominent citizens, and has sarcophagi commemorating the novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), the philosopher Carlo Cattaneo (1801-1869) and the architect Luca Beltrami (1854-1933). 

The tombs in the archways of the Famedio’s extensive arcades are loaded with statuary in great variety, and avenues radiate from the terrace crowded with a similar variety of fortissimo graves and monuments. 

Mausolea in traditional styles – classical, Romanesque, Byzantine, – stand alongside modern structures of plate glass and steel.  Only Gothic seems to be absent.  Extravagance of design, materials, imagery, style and symbolism abound.  Bronze, copper, masonry and occasionally brick and terracotta are indiscriminately used according to families’ preference. 

Figures are draped across tombs in agonies of grief;  Father Time’s scythe reaches up from the earth.  Alongside symbol and allegory are obvious portraits, including some delightful matriarchs.  There is a surprising number of nudes, the females entirely uncovered and very beautiful, the males strategically covered.

Milan came early to embrace cremation.  Its Crematorium Temple, which also serves as a columbarium, was the first in the world, opened in 1876 and remained in use until 1992.  The range of cremators remains behind iron doors, one of them visible to the public.

I couldn’t begin to catalogue the fine monuments I photographed. 

(Google translations disconcertingly render Italian descriptions of these great monuments, edicola, as “news-stand”;  the French equivalent is Kiosque.  It’s derived from the Latin aedicula, which among other things means “shrine”.)

One exceptional example, the tomb of the textile manufacturer Antonio Bernocchi (1859-1930), is an inventive reiteration of Trajan’s Column in Rome, designed by the architect Alessandro Minali (1888-1960) and the sculptor Giannino Castiglioni (1884-1971):  Bernocchi Newsstand | Monumental Cemetery Milan (comune.milano.it). 

The tomb of the Campari family, beverage manufacturers whose famous aperitif bears their name, is an elaborate life-sized representation of the Last Supper by Giannino Castiglioni (1884-1971) – Campari Newsstand | Monumental Cemetery Milan (comune.milano.it) – and the monument to the family of Francesco Podreider (1830-1894), by Domenico Ghidoni (1857-1920), is a dramatic portrayal of Christ Cleansing the Temple:  Gospel Iconography | Monumental Cemetery Milan (comune.milano.it).

The composer Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) lies in a mausoleum decorated with carvings by Leonardo Bistolfi (1859-1933), along with his wife Carla Finzi (d1951), his four children and his son-in-law, the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) and his daughter-in-law, the classical dancer Lucia Fornaroli (1888-1954):  Toscanini Newsstand | Monumental Cemetery Milan (comune.milano.it)

In contrast to these lively expressions of grief, the dour monument designed by Mario Palanti (1885-1978) for his parents and family, consists of truncated Doric columns supporting a vast sarcophagus.  It was built in the years 1928-30, and its crypt was used as an air-raid shelter in the Second World War.  It now serves as the Civic Mausoleum [Civico Mausoleo] honouring Milanese celebrities such as Herbert Einstein (1847-1902), father of the physicist Albert.

The Monumental Cemetery is overwhelming.  It certainly deserves more than an hour of anyone’s time.

Liverpool Olympia

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Olympia Theatre, West Derby Road, Liverpool

The circus industry has traditionally been peripatetic – we associate going to the circus with a “big top” tent in a field – but there was a moment, early in the twentieth century, when it seemed sensible to build auditoria big enough to house a circus ring.

That moment was brief.  The prolific theatre-architect Frank Matcham (1854-1920) converted the Brighton Hippodrome from an ice rink in 1901, but it was rebuilt as a variety theatre the following year.  Frank Matcham’s London Hippodrome on the corner of Leicester Square, built in 1900, was adapted as a variety theatre in 1909.

There are two places in Britain where you can still experience circus in a purpose-built hippodrome – Blackpool Tower Circus (1894;  interior by Frank Matcham 1900) and the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome (1903), but there’s a third survivor which is one of the largest and grandest of Frank Matcham’s auditoria.

The Olympia Theatre, West Derby Road, Liverpool (1905) was a proscenium theatre with a circus ring and water tank for the briefly fashionable spectacular performances known as naumachiae. 

To accommodate the standard 42ft-diameter circus ring projecting into the stalls area, the proscenium is 48 feet wide, and the stage measured 100 feet wide by 41ft deep.  The fly-grid is 68 feet above the stage floor. 

The base of the ten-foot-deep 80,000-gallon under-stage tank survives without its hydraulic machinery:  the basement storey also contained stabling for elephants and horses, and cages for lions.

The original seating-capacity was 3,750.

The Olympia was built by Moss Empires only a couple of hundred yards from their rival Thomas Barrasford’s 3,500-seat Royal Hippodrome (1902;  demolished 1984), which stood opposite Low Hill Cemetery (now Grant Gardens). 

Ken Roe, in his visit-notes for a Cinema Theatre Association tour in 2000, commented –

The Olympia was provided with 36 separate exits, but the problem turned out to be how to get the people into the place, not out…

Harold Akroyd, The Dream Palaces of Liverpool (Amber Valley 1987), remarked that –

…an asylum once occupied the site of the Olympia, which prompted the comment that Moss & Stoll must have been mad to open a music hall so close to the city…

This story is too good to check, however:  The Stage, April 27th 1905, indicates that the site was formerly occupied by the Licensed Victuallers Association almshouses.

Three balconies spread the audience across a wider space than a conventional proscenium theatre.  Beneath the Dress Circle were ten boxes facing the stage.  The additional proscenium boxes facing the audience were clearly intended only for circus shows.  Their onion domes are complemented by the plaster elephant-heads that embellish the side walls.  A sliding roof provided ventilation between houses.

Associated British Cinemas Ltd took on the lease in 1929.   On February 11th in that year the Olympia became Liverpool’s first sound-cinema when Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer opened.  For perhaps the only time in the Olympia’s history, queues stretched out of sight down West Derby Road.

As competition from large-capacity modern super-cinemas grew in the 1930s even the Royal Hippodrome went over to films, and ABC, which operated both buildings, closed the Olympia as a cinema on March 25th 1939.

After wartime use as a Royal Navy Depot, the Olympia was sold to Mecca Ltd and reopened as the Locarno Ballroom in 1949. 

This conversion did practically irreversible damage to Frank Matcham’s auditorium.  Raising the stalls floor to stage level involved inserting concrete pillars into the basement area; the rear-stalls projection-box was dismantled and stairways were constructed from the stalls to the Grand Circle.

In August 1964 Mecca closed the ballroom and adapted the building as one of their chain of bingo clubs. 

Clearance of the surrounding housing led to closure in 1982, after which it remained on Mecca’s hands, listed Grade II, empty and for sale.  Its listing was raised to Grade II* in 1985. 

It remained dark until Silver Leisure Ltd, owners of the adjacent Grafton Ballroom, bought it in April 1990.  Ten years later Silver Leisure reopened the building, impressively refurbished, with a programme of boxing, wrestling and concerts. 

It has continued in the same family ownership, renamed Eventim Olympia with standing space in the stalls and seating in the lower and upper balconies. From the outset it was a huge risk to build the Olympia in inner-city Liverpool, but against huge odds, this enormous building has survived and earns its keep in the twenty-first century.

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

Rats desert a burning signal box

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Diesel multiple unit approaching Caernarvon railway station from Menai Bridge (1963)

I came across a colour slide that I took as a teenager on holiday with my dad of a diesel multiple unit approaching Caernarfon (then spelled ‘Caernarvon’ by the railway authorities) in the summer of 1963.  DMUs were still a novelty in those days.

We didn’t travel there by rail:  my dad was by then the proud owner of a Morris Minor convertible which he called Gladys.

In the 1980s I walked down the trackbed through the cutting that led from the site of Caernarfon station beneath the town centre and into a short tunnel leading to the Slate Quay.

Later still, when the tunnel became an underpass, I drove my car through it.

Remembering this prompted me to look up Caernarfon railway station on the compendious Subterranea Britannica website:  Disused Stations: Caernarvon Station (disused-stations.org.uk).

There I found an entertaining anecdote about Caernarvon No 1 signal box which controlled movements east of the station towards Menai Bridge.

Apparently, this box had for decades proved difficult to man because crews were intimidated by a colony of rats who liked to dine on the grease that lubricated the machinery beneath the floor.

The rats didn’t seem to mind the humans at all, but the railwaymen tired of hordes of rodents climbing all over the place.

When services south of Caernarfon ceased in 1964 the station became a terminus.  The track layout and signalling was altered and the No 1 signal box was closed and its mechanism dismantled.

There followed an unrepeatable public entertainment.

The wooden structure was soaked in paraffin and surrounded by dogs.  When the building was set on fire, hundreds of rats raced for safety and the dogs captured only a few.

The survivors spread across town and were for some time an inconvenience.

Nowadays, it seems, rats are no more a problem in Caernarfon than anywhere else:  Are you never more than 6ft away from a rat? – BBC News.

It’s once more possible to catch a train from Caernarfon, southwards over the 2ft-gauge Welsh Highland Railway, opened in 1997:  Home Page – Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland Railways (festrail.co.uk).

Zion Graveyard 4

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Zion Congregational Church and Sabbath School, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1978)

When I went looking for the site of the Zion Congregational Church in 2017 while reconnoitring my Heritage Open Days Walk Round Attercliffe, all that could be seen through the boundary fence was a twelve-foot-high jungle.

Coincidentally, that was the summer when the group that maintains the undenominational Upper Wincobank Chapel came looking for the burial place of the Chapel’s founder, Mary Ann Rawson (1801-1887). 

It took a great deal of work to locate her family tomb, and the group resolved to form the Friends of Zion Graveyard, which quickly purchased and restored the site and made it accessible.

I don’t do gardening, so instead I’ve brought visitors to the Graveyard through my Walks Round Attercliffe and Bus Rides Round Attercliffe and busied myself researching the history of the buildings and the generations of worshippers dating back to the end of the eighteenth century.

During the lockdown period the Friends produced a series of interpretation boards – to which I contributed – to fix to the boundaries of the Graveyard.

These make a significant difference to visitors’ understanding, particularly because the images show how much the surroundings have changed since the 1970s:  two of the congregation’s three buildings have been destroyed, along with all of the surrounding housing.

Visitors to the Zion Graveyard can now take away the information and the pictures in a guide-book, The Story of Zion Graveyard Attercliffe:

Soane’s country house restored

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Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing, London: Upper Drawing Room

Just as Sir John Soane’s Moggerhanger Park has been restored after twentieth-century alterations, so his own country seat, Pitzhanger Manor, has been returned to a state that its architect and first occupant would recognise.

By 1800 Soane had established his career:  he was appointed architect and surveyor to the Bank of England in 1788 and clerk of works for St James’s Palace and the Palace of Westminster in 1791, and purchased and rebuilt the town house at 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields that now forms part of the Sir John Soane Museum in 1792.

Though Lincoln’s Inn Fields was ideal for conducting his busy architectural practice he sought a convenient country retreat where he could entertain clients as well as friends.  He purchased a house called Payton Place, which he renamed Pitzhanger Manor, in Ealing on the London-to-Oxford turnpike that provided easy access to and from the capital.

The village of Ealing was becoming fashionable:  Soane’s neighbours at the start of the new century included HRH Prince Edward (1767-1820), newly-created Duke of Kent and Strathearn, and Spencer Perceval (1762-1812), remembered as the only British prime minister to have been assassinated.

Soane had first encountered the Payton Place building in the late 1760s:  he worked on the south wing when he was apprenticed to the architect George Dance the Younger (1741-1825).

He bought the property for £4,500 and demolished all but Dance’s south wing, replacing it with his own design, completed in 1804.  Soane and his family lived there only until 1810:  he became estranged from his two ne’er-do-well sons and his wife Eliza preferred to live in town.  At Lincoln’s Inn Fields he purchased and rebuilt the adjacent houses, 13 and 14 which, with No 12, now form the Museum.

The three-bay centrepiece of Pitzhanger Manor echoes Robert Adam’s south front at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, and is derived from the triumphal Arch of Constantine in Rome.  Whereas earlier eighteenth-century architects had used ashlar or stucco to set the tone of their exteriors, Soane here contrasted brick and Portland stone, and stretched the narrow façade with a lofty attic.  The buildings bristles with statues and medallions of Coade stone, the twice-fired hard-wearing artificial ceramic that was prevalent from the early 1770s to the late 1840s in London and elsewhere in the British Isles and overseas.

Pitzhanger Manor is rather like Tardis:  it seems bigger inside than its exterior suggests.  This is because Soane retained the Dance wing to the south and his service buildings to the north were replaced in 1901-02 when the house became Ealing’s public library.

Like Moggerhanger Park, unsympathetic institutional use allowed a practical restoration. 

From 1985 until 2019, in gradual stages, the London Borough of Ealing and the Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery Trust have transformed the place into a sympathetic restoration of the historic house, with the library wing adapted as an excellent modern art gallery.  On the site of the former walled kitchen garden stands Soane’s Kitchen, an attractive modern café-restaurant:  Pitzhanger » Eat & Drink.

For details of opening times and events at Pitzhanger House, visit Pitzhanger » Current Events.

Great Big Trains of Wales

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Llangollen Railway: Carrog Station, Denbighshire (2022)

The first time I visited Llangollen (by car), you could still catch a train there and head east to Chester or Shrewsbury.

Those days have long gone:  the Beeching Axe fell in these parts at the beginning of 1965.  Freight trains from Ruabon continued to serve Llangollen Goods Yard until 1968, after which the track was quickly lifted all the way to Barmouth on the west coast of Wales.

A group of enthusiasts leased Llangollen Station and three miles of trackbed westwards, and when the station reopened to the public in 1975 sixty feet of track had been reinstated.

Subsequent developments were not unlike saving up pocket money to buy more track for a train set:  Shell Oil offered a mile of redundant track, which enabled the Llangollen Railway Trust to lay three-quarters of mile to Pentrefelin and use the rest to construct sidings for the accumulating quantity of rolling stock.

Thereafter, once the Dee Bridge had been refurbished by the local council, the route steadily grew in length – firstly 1¾ miles to Berwyn (March 1986), then Deeside Halt (1990), Glyndyfrdwy (1993) and eventually Carrog, 7½ miles from Llangollen (1996).

Development has been slowed by a succession of misfortunes.  The Llangollen Railway PLC experienced financial difficulties, not helped by the pandemic lockdowns, and went into receivership in March 2021.  Services were taken over and resumed by the Llangollen Railway Trust from July 2021.

In recent years, the track has been reinstated to Corwen, ten miles from Llangollen, and a brand new Corwen Central station opened in June 2023 to replace the unusable original, so that services can resume to a commercially worthwhile destination: Llangollen Railway | Heritage Train Rides in the United Kingdom (llangollen-railway.co.uk).

The ride up and down the beautiful Dee Valley is a restful experience, whether on a 1950s diesel railcar or on a loco-hauled train which may include an observation car.  There are refreshment rooms at Llangollen, Berwyn and Carrog.

While I savour the experience that a generation of enthusiasts has worked to recreate over decades between Llangollen and Corwen I can’t help regretting what was lost in the 1960s. 

The Ordnance Survey map shows mile after mile of “dismantled railway” stretching through beautiful Welsh countryside between Ruabon and Morfa Mawddach, the junction for Barmouth. 

Ten miles of trackbed is available to walkers on the Mawddach Trail between Dolgellau and Morfa Mawddach and the Bala Lake Railway runs narrow-gauge trains over a 4½-mile lakeside stretch but, because of the sacrifice of small sections to road improvements and building developments, the rest of the line is rendered useless and inaccessible.

It took only seven years to build this line as a commercial undertaking in the 1860s and even less time to dismantle it for scrap a century later.  Safeguarding its integrity as an amenity would have been a simple administrative matter. 

There was no way of computing social and environmental benefits in the 1960s, and we are the poorer for it.

My dad’s lost opportunity

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King Edward VII School, Sheffield

I’ve known for a long time that my dad missed a lifetime opportunity in 1926 at the age of twelve when he was awarded a scholarship to King Edward VII Grammar School, which had a reputation as the best place in Sheffield to gain an education.

King Ted’s, as people called it (and still do), was at the time a fee-paying school where there were social expectations alongside academic opportunities.

My dad’s parents felt compelled to turn the scholarship down because they simply couldn’t afford the incidentals such as uniform and fares and needed their sons and daughters to start work at the then school-leaving age of fourteen.

In addition, it was the year of the General Strike and they had five children, with a sixth on the way, and there was no telling which of them might pass scholarships in future.  My granddad was a boilerman in the coke ovens at Tinsley Park, so their finances were precarious.

All this was simply family history of purely personal interest until I came across an obituary for Bill Moore (1911-2008), a celebrated figure in left-wing politics in Yorkshire and beyond, who was said to be the first Attercliffe boy to win a free scholarship to grammar school:  https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/19/bill-moore.

This set me thinking.  King Edward’s was founded in 1905.  If it took seventeen years for a lad from any of the numerous elementary schools in the Lower Don Valley to gain a free grammar-school education, perhaps my dad might have been the second.

I checked the Education Committee minutes and without looking further back than 1920 I discovered that Bill Moore was by no means the first Attercliffe lad to go to King Ted’s.  Between eleven and twenty scholarships were awarded each year from 1920 to 1926, mostly to pupils from schools on the prosperous west side of the city. 

In 1921 William Wild, aged 12 years 3 months, left my alma mater, Huntsman’s Gardens Council School, for King Edward’s on a Close Entrance Scholarship.  His father was a brass foundry manager, so could no doubt afford the tram fare, yet the family lived on Brinsworth Street, two minutes’ walk from Huntsman’s Gardens, in the very heart of the industrial East End – by no means a leafy affluent suburb.

By the time Bill Moore was eligible in the summer of 1923 the system had changed and under his birth name, Enos Leslie Moore, he was awarded a Free Scholarship, “tenable for the period of school life and covering free tuition, the provision of all school amenities and the use, but not the gift, of books” along with a maintenance grant.

He stayed at King Edward’s until 1930 when he won a further scholarship to study history at Oriel College, Oxford.  In 1935, after graduation he joined the Communist Party and engaged in left-wing politics for the rest of his long life.

Bill Moore’s story gives me a perspective of the magnitude of my dad’s loss, and explains why he and my mother were so keen for me to have the opportunity that had been denied them.

For that I have always been profoundly grateful.

Reclaiming a wasting asset

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Queen’s Pier, Ramsey, Isle of Man (2023)

Photo: © John Binns

When I wrote a blog-article about Queen’s Pier, Ramsey in the Isle of Man in 2011 there was little to suggest that it wouldn’t continue to decay, as it had done for twenty years, yet despite many delays and the tribulations of the pandemic, effective plans are at last in place to restore the Isle of Man’s largest surviving engineering structure.

The island is rich in industrial and transport archaeology because the Manx habitually leave redundant structures standing unless there’s a need or an economic reason to destroy them.

That’s why the island still retains steam and electric railways, a horse tramway, the Great Laxey Wheel and much else in situ and in use.

The flip-side of this conservatism is that the wheels grind slowly when decay becomes dangerous and restoration is urgent.

The last Steam Packet ship departed from Ramsey in 1970;  the disused landing stage became unsafe and was closed in 1979;  the little pier tramway closed in 1981.

In 1991, after the café at the pier head was burnt down, rebuilt and twice vandalised, the Manx Department of Highways, Ports & Properties closed the entire structure permanently and commissioned a survey which concluded that demolition would cost over £1 million and a full restoration £2.5 million.

The Manx government, Tynwald, continued to provide £40,000 a year for minimal safety maintenance, and a Friends of Ramsey Queen’s Pier group was formed in 1994, initially with the comedian Norman Wisdom, a Manx resident, as president.  The following year the pier was added to the Manx list of protected buildings to safeguard its future.

Discussions about restoration proceeded at a glacial pace, until in 2011 Tynwald allocated £1.8 million to stabilise the structure.

This led to a fresh report which planned a sequenced restoration in seven phases, each of them costing £1.2-1.7 million, overseen by the Queen’s Pier Restoration Trust (QPRT), which in 2016 began work on the fifty metres nearest the promenade.

The first three bays (of a total of sixty) were reopened to the public in 2021, with the return of the tramway’s locomotive and carriage from the Jurby Transport Museum.

The current phase involves restoration of Bays 4-8, of which the first three bays are close to completion.

This steady, methodical process of fundraising and practical work is an admirable exercise in co-operation between volunteers and the Government, which will clearly take a decade or two before the public can, in the words of the historian Richard Crowhurst, “stroll along these decks once again taking in the sea air, and partake of a cup of tea and a sandwich at the end”.

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.

Try-out for St Paul’s

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St Stephen Walbrook Church, City of London

Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was a miraculous human being. 

If central London were obliterated by a sudden disaster nowadays, it’s unlikely that its restoration would be entrusted to a professor of astronomy, but after the Great Fire in 1666 it was the obvious solution.  At that time the best professionals to employ in construction were academics who understood the physics of making buildings stand up.

King Charles II had already consulted Wren, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, over several projects, including a much-needed restoration of the medieval St Paul’s Cathedral, when two-thirds of the City was burnt down in five days beginning in the early hours of September 2nd 1666.  Wren surveyed the wreckage, mapped out a comprehensive, radical plan to rebuild and laid it before the King on September 11th.  This adventurous scheme was scuppered because it necessitated wholesale revision of property boundaries.

Nevertheless, Wren – then in his mid-thirties – spent the rest of his long life embellishing London with replacements for the many destroyed parish churches and constructing his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral.

One of these parish churches is distinctive as what Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as “a try-out for St Paul’s”.

The site of the medieval St Stephen’s Walbrook was hemmed in on three sides by other buildings and the street, which takes its name from the now-hidden river that runs south into the Thames.  On part of this footprint Wren laid out his biggest London parish church to a largely symmetrical plan and graced it with a top-lit dome.

Pevsner describes in intricate detail the tension Wren contrived between the visitor’s perception of a longitudinal rectangular interior and the overarching centrality of the dome and its supporting columns [Simon Bradley & Nikolaus Pevsner,The Buildings of England:  London 1:  The City of London (Yale University Press 2002), pp 260-261].

It’s a breathtaking space which, despite repeated restorations, retains the integrity of Wren’s intentions in all respects but one.

In 1987 the churchwarden, Peter Palumbo (b 1935), supervised a much-needed refurbishment and reordered the layout, reducing the linearity that Wren intended and emphasising the space beneath the dome.

Lord Palumbo (as he became in 1991) had commissioned the sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) to design a white polished stone altar that sits directly beneath the dome.  It gives priest and people the more direct intimacy that suits present-day worship, and contributes to the lively ministry of a London church, which has few if any resident parishioners, literally next door to the Mansion House.

I saw a well-attended weekday lunchtime Choral Eucharist sung by a youthful choir of organ scholars accompanied by the demure playing of a young lady organist.  The place clearly serves the needs of a community of city workers seeking a calming interlude in their working day.  I wish I could have caught the monthly Rush Hour Jazz.

There’s a lot going on at St Stephen Walbrook:  St Stephen Walbrook London – a place of celebration.  It’s the living testament of St Francis of Assisi:  “Preach the gospel, and if necessary use words”.