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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rylands Building, Market Street, Manchester (2023)
John Rylands (1801-1888) was a Manchester textile manufacturer whose name lives on in the John Rylands Library, founded as a memorial by his widow Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (1843-1908) and opened in 1900.
From 1822 his company, Rylands & Sons Ltd, occupied a site in the city’s High Street in what is now called the Northern Quarter, and replaced these premises with the Rylands Building (1929-32), a bulky modern textile warehouse on Market Street faced in Portland stone with distinctive corner turrets, in a sober version of Art Deco.
The architects were Harry Smith Fairhurst (1868-1945) and his son Philip Garland Fairhurst (1900-1987). The elder Fairhurst had already built Lancaster House (1905-1910), India House (1906) and Bridgewater House (1912), all on Whitworth Street, and York House (1910-11, demolished 1974) on Major Street – all of them to the Manchester pattern of a packing house and wholesale showroom.
The Rylands Building is prominently visible at the corner of Piccadilly Gardens, an ornamental space opened up on the site of the demolished Manchester Royal Infirmary.
In 1957 the huge Rylands headquarters was bought by the owners of Paulden’s department store after a fire destroyed their All Saints premises south of the city centre. The splendid architectural treatment, inside and out, and the vast amount of floor space made the former warehouse an admirable retail store, which was rebranded by its ultimate owners, Debenhams, in 1973.
The debacle that led to the complete closure of the Debenhams chain in 2021 meant that the Rylands Building suddenly became a huge void in the heart of Manchester’s retail quarter – half a million square feet of retail floor-space over ten floors encased in a magnificent and prominent building within sight of the city’s tourist hub, Piccadilly Gardens, and within reach of the nearby Northern Quarter.
The way forward is Rylands Manchester. The developer AM Alpha gained permission for a scheme by Jeffrey Bell Architects adding four storeys on top of the present roof to compensate for carving an open atrium out of the centre bringing natural light within the building from the second to the seventh floor.
The project respects the appearance of the 1929 design while observing the Manchester Zero-Carbon Action Plan which aims to make Greater Manchester carbon-neutral by 2038 [Zero Carbon Manchester | Zero Carbon Manchester | Manchester City Council]. Insulation, glazing and energy provision will conform to expected future needs, and the respect for original architectural detail includes installing up-to-date Crittall Windows units corresponding with the appearance of the original fenestration.
The finished scheme will offer 70,000 square feet of retail space at ground level, 258,000 square feet of office space above and a winter garden on the sixth floor. The atrium storeys each include open space, terraced to provide sight of the sky and sheltered by a glazed roof: https://www.maxfordham.com/projects/the-rylands-building.
Work is expected to be completed by 2025, a tribute to Manchester’s efficacy in grabbing opportunities to improve the urban environment, as it did after the IRA bomb-attack in 1996.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, 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.
Isle of Man Railway between Port St Mary and Port Erin: locomotive 15 ‘Caledonia’
Wheels turn slowly in the Isle of Man. That’s why one-third of its steam railway continues to operate after 130 years, and why you can still ride on the first two cars delivered to what became the Manx Electric Railway in 1893: Senior movers | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.
Inevitably, there have been losses. There was a cable tramway in Douglas until 1929, when it was scrapped – superannuated, unloved and unbelievably noisy. The Isle of Man Railway lines to Peel and Ramsey were closed in 1968 and lifted.
But each of the surviving nineteen-century transport systems – the steam railway (1874), the Douglas horse tramway (1876), the Manx Electric Railway (1893-99) and the Snaefell Mountain Railway (1895) – has more than enough rolling stock to sustain a vigorous present-day tourist trade.
There have been misfortunes: the Manx Electric lost part of its fleet in a depot fire in 1930. Two of the six Snaefell Mountain Railway cars have in recent years run away from the summit: no 3 smashed to pieces, fortunately without injuries or fatalities, in 2016. A second runaway, no 2, with crew and passengers on board, was brought to a safe halt the following year. There was a yard sale of surplus horse trams in 2016, all of which went to good homes for sums between £1,000 and £2,800 each.
This tight little island, 32 miles long and 14 miles wide at most, is the home of a unique collection of nineteenth-century rail transport lines still in full working order.
Tynwald, the Manx government, is considering how to develop these assets in future. The steam and electric railways are already tuned to the entertainment value of heritage transport, like their colleagues across in Blackpool, but the horse tramway has become bogged down in the vexed redevelopment of Douglas promenade. There is an excellent transport museum at Jurby in the north of the island, but the vehicles have not yet provided a mobile tourist attraction to supplement heritage rail.
The practicality of supplementing modern street transport with heritage services is proven across the world, evident in the success of San Francisco’s cable-cars and streetcars, the Melbourne City Circle and Hong Kong’s double-deckers (which look traditional but despite their appearance are in fact modernised).
Heritage rail has the double advantage of attracting enthusiasts who appreciate its historic appeal at the same time as ordinary tourists enjoy an uncommon holiday experience.
This is an invitation to think imaginatively about how to make the island’s transport even more interesting and financially secure.
But bearing in mind the current lamentable state of the horse trams, it would be wise not to expect rapid change.
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.
Walking down the street in the centre of Hobart, Tasmania in 2017 I noticed a red double-deck tourist bus approaching and instantly recognised its destination display, ‘CITY/CIRCULAR’.
The typeface was unmistakably from my home city of Sheffield.
When I checked the vehicle’s history I found that it was indeed from Sheffield, dating from 1973, the year before Sheffield Transport Department merged into South Yorkshire Passenger Transport and the livery changed from the smart azure blue and cream to a more insipid coffee and cream. Its original identity was no: 299 in the Sheffield fleet, with the UK registration UWA 299L: 298. UWA 298L: Sheffield Transport | Sheffield Transport 298… | Flickr. This had been obscured by its Australian identity as part of Red Decker Tours Hobart Explorer fleet.
Red double-deckers are ubiquitous in locations that lend themselves to hop-on-hop-off city tours, whereas for ordinary services Australian bus operators have traditionally stuck to single-deck vehicles.
I’ve encountered British-style double-deck tourist buses as far away as Brisbane, Philadelphia, Sydney and Tokyo, but it’s never occurred to me to notice their provenance.
Clearly, Red Decker Tours found it practical to import British buses to the Antipodes for the sake of the better view they offer visitors, though their website shop window shows that they now use purpose-built vehicles with panoramic windows as well as open top decks.
I was born in working-class post-war Sheffield to parents who were determined that I would have the educational opportunities that had been denied them between the wars.
They started early, teaching me to read at every opportunity, which included reading the destinations – and the fleet numbers – of the trams that went back and forth along Attercliffe Common outside our house.
The typeface of the blinds that Sheffield Corporation used for both tram and bus destinations is Curwen Sans, developed by the typographer Harold Curwen (1885-1949), and dating from 1912.
Harold Curwen was taught at the Central School of Arts & Crafts by Edward Johnston (1872-1944) and Eric Gill (1882-1940), respectively the designers of the London Transport Johnston font (1916) and Gill Sans (1928).
Curwen’s lettering is distinctive and I recognised it immediately when some years ago I spotted and afterwards bought a half-size canvas print of a Sheffield tram blind in an antique shop on the Abbeydale Road.
Like Johnston, the Curwen ‘O’ is a circle, as for practical purposes are the ‘C’, ‘G’ and ‘Q’. The ‘W’ is in fact two overlapping ‘Vs’. The bar, or middle stroke, of ‘E’ and ‘F’ protrudes, instead of being the same length as or less than those above and below. Perhaps this is to improve the legibility of a white-on-black sign on the front of an approaching vehicle.
The individual destinations are meticulously composed. Abbreviations – ‘ST.’ for ‘STREET’ and ‘RD.’ for ‘ROAD’ – are followed by dots. ‘HILLSBORO’’ has an apostrophe but ‘HUNTERS BAR’ oddly doesn’t. ‘WOODHOUSE ROAD’, which would only appear in the lower aperture below ‘INTAKE’ above it, has brackets.
Destinations too long to appear as a single line – ‘INTAKE/(ELM TREE)’, ‘CITY/(FITZALAN SQUARE)’ and ‘FOOTBALL/GROUND’ are displayed as two lines which are not of equal height. The top line is bigger than the bottom, following the typographical convention that the upper half of a line of letters is more noticeable than the bottom.
Even the sequence of destinations is carefully thought out, with displays grouped geographically, clockwise from north to west, to save unnecessary winding of the fiddly handle that turned the blind rollers.
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