Churnet Valley Railway

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Churnet Valley Railway, Kingsley & Froghall Station, Staffordshire
Churnet Valley Railway: Kingsley & Froghall Station, Staffordshire

On Friday March 7th 2025 the enterprising, ambitious Churnet Valley Railway operated the first passenger-carrying train to the site of its new Leek (Churnet Valley) station:  Our First Heritage Open Day – What A Huge Success! – Churnet Valley Railway.

(I wish the CHR had not hijacked the brand ‘Heritage Open Day’ which has been the brand of England’s annual celebration of the nation’s history and culture since 1994.)

Leek is a market town with a current population of twenty thousand, which until 1965 was an important rail crossroads created by the North Staffordshire Railway, the much-loved “Knotty”, linking the Staffordshire Moorlands with Stoke-on-Trent, Macclesfield and Uttoxeter, where main lines extended to London, Birmingham, Manchester and Derby.

The north-to-south route stretched from near Macclesfield to Uttoxeter on the line from Crewe to Derby, while the westerly route reached Leek from Stoke-on-Trent.  A branch line eastwards from Leek Brook to Waterhouses formed an end-on junction with the 2ft 6in-gauge Leek & Manifold Valley Light Railway, built to serve a dairy at Ecton though the terminus was further on at Hulme End.  It opened in 1904 and closed thirty years later, shortly after the creamery at Ecton closed.

Services declined in stages between 1956 and 1970, except for a freight connection between the Oakamoor Sand Sidings and Stoke.  Track was lifted but the trackbed remains on the ten-mile line westwards between Leek and Stoke and south from Oakamoor to Alton Towers and Denstone.  The routes north from Leek to Macclesfield and south of Denstone to Uttoxeter have been blocked by redevelopment, including road improvements and the vast JCB factory at Rocester.

The site of the original Leek station is now a Morrisons supermarket.

The Churnet Valley Railway punches well above its weight.  It grew out of earlier efforts to safeguard the railways around Leek from 1971 onwards, and from small beginnings focused on taking over the seven-mile route through the valley between Oakamoor and Leek Brook, which was accomplished when heritage train services began in 1996.  The further mile to the site of the new Leek station was added in 2024.

The stations are interesting in their own right and a testament to the energy behind their restoration.

Leek Brook is only accessible by rail at present.  It was the junction for the St Edward’s Hospital tramway, which ran three-quarters of a mile through the grounds of the Staffordshire County Mental Hospital, using 220-volt DC electric overhead.  Passengers were conveyed in a second-hand London horse tram, but the main purpose of the tramway was supplying the hospital with coal.  Passenger service didn’t last beyond the 1920s, but the coal traffic continued to the end of 1954.

Cheddleton station is the only original building remaining, and was famously saved in 1974 by a local businessman, Norman Hancock, parking his Jaguar on the level crossing to prevent its demolition.  The station was subsequently listed Grade II and became the original base of the grandly-titled Cheshire and Staffordshire Railway Society which ultimately became the Churnet Valley Railway.

Consall station was opened in 1902 to serve the nearby village and the workers of the adjacent forge and lime kilns.  The main building on the down platform is a reproduction, completed in 2002, after which the original 1902 shelter was reinstated on the restored up platform which abuts the Caldon Canal.

Kingsley & Froghall station is a convincing reproduction of the demolished original station.  After passenger services were restored in 2001, the main building on the down platform was completed two years later, followed by the shelter on the opposite side which, like Consall, overhangs the canal.

Timetabled services run on Wednesdays and at weekends from March to October, with additional operations for special events on bank holidays and other occasions:  Events Calendar – Churnet Valley Railway.

The on-train catering offers an impressive range of alternatives, from breakfast to curry night, and there is a tea-room at Kingsley & Froghall.  Prices range from £15 for pie-and-mash to £80 for a murder-mystery experience:  Steam Train Dining Experiences – Churnet Valley Railway.

This is a heritage railway that’s going places.

Caldon Canal

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Caldon Canal: Consall Forge, Staffordshire
Caldon Canal: Consall Forge, Staffordshire

Whether you walk, cycle or cruise, the eighteen-mile Caldon Canal is an ideal connector between interesting places between Etruria, on the northern edge of Stoke-on-Trent, where Josiah Wedgwood established his famous pottery, and the depths of the little-known Churnet Valley, hidden from the noisy pleasures of the Alton Towers theme park.

The canal is practically a branch of the Trent & Mersey Canal, which financed its construction, climbing from Etruria to a summit level at Stockton Brook and then following the River Churnet to its terminus at Froghall within reach of the quarries at Cauldon.

It opened in 1778 and was quickly connected to numerous quarry tramroads, adding to the traffic on the main line of the Trent & Mersey, which became so heavily-used that water-supply problems caused intolerable hold-ups.

The canal company needed the support of landowners and townspeople around the market town of Leek in order to build an additional reservoir at Rudyard, so the three-mile-long Leek branch (1800-01) acted as a feeder for traffic as well as water.

A further waterway, the Uttoxeter Canal (opened in 1811), continued from Froghall through Oakamoor and past Alton Towers to Rocester and Uttoxeter.  The canal had a dedicated wharf to bring building materials for the Earl of Shrewsbury’s vast house and landscape garden.  A proposed further extension from Uttoxeter to Ashbourne remained unbuilt.

The Trent & Mersey Canal was sold, along with the Caldon Branch, to the North Staffordshire Railway in 1845, and the railway company saw potential in using waterways as feeders to their operations. 

The NSR closed the Uttoxeter Canal in 1849 in order to use the route for the track of the Churnet Valley Railway, and though canal traffic declined towards the end of the nineteenth century between Froghall, Leek and the railway, the waterway never actually closed.

However, it became practically unnavigable by the 1950s, and it was rescued by the Inland Waterways Association’s collaboration with Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Staffordshire County Council.  The main line to Froghall was reopened in 1974, followed by all but the last half-mile of the Leek Branch.

A particularly interesting walkable section of the Caldon Canal starting from Cheddleton Station southwards includes a length where the canal runs into the River Churnet, simply because there is insufficient room in the narrow valley to accommodate both waterways.

The canal and river separate at Consall, where the remains of the eighteenth-century limekilns are a reminder that this was an industrial area dependent on water for transportation. 

The canalside Black Lion pub [Black Lion, Consall Forge – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale] is a welcome opportunity to rest and, if the timing’s right, it’s possible to return to Cheddleton from the picturesque station on the Churnet Valley Railway.

Detailed information about the places of interest along the canal is at The Ultimate Guide to the Caldon Canal – Leek branch – Black Prince.

Bradford Live

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Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, now Bradford Live (2025)
Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, now Bradford Live: restaurant decorative detail (2025)

I was privileged recently to join a Cinema Theatre Association visit to Bradford Live, the newly-restored New Victoria Cinema (1930), which survived brutal alterations, persistent neglect and threats of demolition until it was rescued and impressively restored as a “world-class” concert venue.

It was, and is, a magnificent building.  It opened on September 22nd 1930 with a spectacular ceremony that included the film Rookery Nook and much else.  Its size ensured its physical and commercial survival through vicissitudes that have blown away many of its contemporaries.

It was designed by a Bradford architect, William Illingworth (1875-1955), and at its opening it was claimed to be the third largest cinema in England and the largest outside London. 

Two of its London rivals of greater size, the Davis Theatre, Croydon (opened December 18th 1928;  3,925 seats) and the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle (opened December 22nd 1930; 3,500 seats) have both gone. 

Comparisons, as the schoolboy said, are odorous.  There were other 1930s cinemas with capacity for around four thousand patrons, some of which survive such as the Granada Cinema, Tooting (opened September 7th 1931;  slightly less than 4,000 seats; currently a bingo club) and the Gaumont State Theatre, Kilburn (opened December 20th 1937;  4,004 seats;  now a church).

William Illingworth provided Bradford with a vast 3,318-seat auditorium with a Wurlitzer organ, facing a stage 70ft wide × 45ft deep, alongside a ballroom, a 200-cover restaurant and a tea-room café.  The auditorium decoration was dignified Italian Renaissance, while the comfortable, stylish front-of-house spaces included Art Deco features and warm, adventurous colour schemes.

Built for Provincial & Cinematograph Theatres, it was operated successively by the Gaumont and Odeon chains and prospered until the 1960s.  In particular, its stage and audience capacity meant that every significant rock and pop performer, excepting only Elvis Presley, appeared in Bradford, from Bill Haley and the Comets and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Film and live performances in the auditorium ceased in 1968 – Rio Conchos and Tom Jones were the last shows.

The conversion to twin screens and bingo in 1968 was ferocious.  The structure was sufficiently robust and there was so much space that the two cinemas were built on the circle and gallery, and the stalls became a huge bingo club.  Most of Illingworth’s plaster decoration was ripped out, though a segment of the balcony plasterwork remained hidden in a void for decades.  The ballroom – redundant for twenty years – became a third screen in 1988.  Schemes to subdivide the building further in 1991 and 1994 came to nothing.

In July 2000 Odeon opened a multiplex at Thornbury, where 3,300 people (almost the original capacity of the New Victoria) could choose from sixteen different movies at any particular time of day.  The game was up for the Odeon cinemas in Bradford and Leeds.

As the Odeon Bradford gradually deteriorated, local people got together to oppose its destruction.  An exceptional campaigner, Norman Littlewood, with his wife Julie, founded the Bradford Odeon Rescue Group (BORG) in 2003.  Its most spectacular demonstration was the occasion in 2007 when a thousand people joined hands and hugged the Odeon.

Schemes to demolish and redevelop came and went until, partly through the efforts of urban explorers, it became apparent that significant amounts of original decorative features survived behind the 1968 alterations.

There’s an extensive exploration of the building showing its condition in 2014 at BRADFORD ODEON STRIPPING OUT ~ AUTUMN 2014, which is narrated by Mark Nicholson, author of the compendious history of the place, The People’s Palace:  the story of Bradford’s New Vic (Bradford Live 2022).

The building passed through the hands of a succession of entities until Bradford Live bought it from the city council for £1, and spent rather more than that – £50.5 million – on its transformation.

It’s a palimpsest – a document that’s been repeatedly erased and rewritten.  Under the aegis of the Aedas Arts Team, William Illingworth’s surviving work has been restored and replicated, particularly in the ballroom and restaurant.  Elsewhere the bare structure of two million bricks and one hundred tons of steel indicates the magnificence of the architect’s engineering:  https://cdn.rt.emap.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/12/28135511/20181203_aat_designandaccessstatementpart1.pdf.

It will be performance, particularly music, that makes this place pay.  The days when three thousand people will queue up to see the same movie at the same time are gone.

The crowded streets that hemmed in the New Victoria in 1930 have been opened out to create Centenary Square, so that Bradford Live sits alongside the Alhambra Theatre and the National Science & Media Museum, within a few minutes’ walk of St George’s Hall and on the doorstep of the University of Bradford campus.

Bradford is the City of Culture in 2025, and now that Trafalgar Entertainment has taken on the role of operator it’s clear that it will contribute much to the culture of the city for years to come:  Show will go on as operator revealed for Bradford Live venue | TheBusinessDesk.com.

Bradford Live does not appear on Bradford’s list of listed buildings.

Exploring Turin:  Superga

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Sassi-Superga Tramway. Turin, Italy
Basilica of Superga, Turin, Italy

The Sassi-Superga Tramway is a rack railway that climbs two thousand feet to a magnificent view of Turin and the Po valley.  Though it operates as a railway it looks like and is called a tramway, to the extent that it has a Turin route-number, 79.

It was built in 1884, powered by cables, and after an accident where the emergency stop fortunately worked perfectly it was rebuilt as a conventional rack railway powered by third-rail electricity in 1935. 

It uses the unusual Italian gauge of 4ft 8⅞in (1,445mm).  This weirdness arises from 1879 legislation which defined railway-track gauges by measuring them from the centre rather than the inside of the rail.  Italian main-line railways have quietly adapted to the worldwide standard gauge of 4ft 8½in (1,435mm), and apart from a solitary funicular, the only other examples of Italian gauge in the world are the tramways of Milan, Naples, Rome and Turin – and the Madrid metro.  There is also an Italian narrow gauge of 3ft 1¹⁄₁₆in (950mm).

The depot yard has no rack track, and a steeple-cab electric locomotive shunts the rack-equipped rolling stock using overhead caternary to the beginning of the rack at the entrance.  Passenger trains are operated, for obvious safety reasons, with the power car propelling one or two trailers, so that in an emergency the brake-power is where it should be.  The loco conveys the cable trams to the Turin street tracks when they need workshop attention.

At the Sassi station there’s a beautifully preserved horse streetcar (no: 197, dating from 1890) in a tiny museum, and outside on a spare platform an early streetcar (no: 209 of 1911).

The trip takes eighteen minutes, mainly through a verdant nature reserve with occasional views of opulent houses with splendid but hilly gardens.  By the time the tram is beyond the midway passing loop you can look straight out of the opposite window at the sky with no sign of the horizon below.

The upper terminus is modern and comfortable:  its café makes the most of the view and it’s pleasant to sit there until the next tram leaves in an hour.

There is a further treat, though, a short, stiff climb above the station.  The Basilica of Superga is a Baroque church, built 1717-31 by Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (1666-1732), later King of Savoy and latterly Sardinia, in fulfilment of a vow he made in the turmoil of the Siege of Turin in 1706.  The Chapel of the Vow, to the left of the sanctuary, is kept as a place of silent contemplation and, filled with respectful Catholics, has a distinctive atmosphere of veneration, like the side chapel of the Holy Shroud in the Duomo.

The Basilica is the site of Italy’s great football tragedy, where the entire Grande Torino football team were killed when their plane, returning from a friendly match in Lisbon, crashed into the retaining wall at the back of the church, on May 4th 1949.

Eighteen players died, together with three members of the coaching team, three club officials, three journalists and the flight crew of four – thirty-one in all.  There were no survivors.

The effect on the world of Italian football and the city of Turin was beyond intense.  Wikipedia describes the aftermath of the tragedy:

At the request of rival teams, Torino were proclaimed winners of the 1948–49 Serie A season on 6 May 1949, and the opponents, as well as Torino, fielded their youth teams in the four remaining games.  On the day of the funeral, half a million people took to the streets of Turin to give a final farewell to the players.  The following season, the other top Italian teams were asked to donate a player to Torino.  The shock of the crash was such that the following year, the Italy national team chose to travel to the 1950 FIFA World Cup in Brazil by ship: Superga air disaster – Wikipedia.

As in subsequent football tragedies, such as Munich (1958), Ibrox (1971), Bradford (1985) and Hillsborough (1989), the emotional toll is remembered by millions every year.

Loxley Chapel Cemetery

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Loxley Chapel Cemetery, South Yorkshire

I’ve never understood why people claim that Sheffield is, like Rome, built on seven hills.  There’s even an Italian restaurant in Hillsborough called Sette Colli:  Home – Sette Colli Restaurant, Italian Restaurant, Sheffield, S6.

In fact, the city is drained by five significant rivers – Don, Loxley, Rivelin, Porter and Sheaf.  That makes six hills, each of which early industry utilised to power water mills.

The Don, which flows to Doncaster, is joined by the Rother in Rotherham.

The Sheaf is said to give the city its name, which explains the sheaves of corn on the city’s coat of arms.

The Loxley, which flows eastwards from the Pennine foothills through Bradfield to join the River Rivelin at Malin Bridge and then the River Don at Owlerton, brought the waters released by the Dale Dike Dam disaster thundering through these villages in March 1864.

On the northern side of the Loxley valley, a chapel was constructed in 1787 at a cost of £1,000 by members of the congregation of St Nicholas’ Church, Bradfield, who resisted the dismissal of the minister, Rev A Benjamin Greaves.

This fine, dignified building looks out above the road to Bradfield.  Practically square in plan, it’s distinguished by its elegant Venetian windows.  It could accommodate up to a thousand people and is surrounded by an extensive burial ground.

By 1798, after Rev Greaves had moved on, the building was leased to Dissenters and when they bought it for £315 it became Loxley Independent Church and, later, Loxley Congregational Church.

Through the nineteenth century the chapel and its surroundings were repeatedly improved – a schoolroom and minister’s house in 1855, the burial ground extended in 1875, and the chapel restored in 1890-91 – and in the twentieth century, with a depleted congregation, it continued to act as a focal point for the widespread farming community.  In 1972 it was renamed Loxley United Reformed Church.

By 1985, when it was listed Grade II* [LOXLEY UNITED REFORMED CHURCH, Bradfield – 1314565 | Historic England] indicating its historical and architectural importance, it was also placed on the Buildings At Risk Register.  After storm damage in 1989 it was extensively repaired and reopened in 1990, but two years later services ceased, though burials continued in the cemetery, and in 1996 the United Reformed Church sold the chapel and the cemetery to a private developer, now Ali Property Development.

The chapel continued to deteriorate until on August 17th 2016 it caught fire.  The fire brigade had difficulty putting three tenders within reach, and the roof and interior was entirely destroyed, leaving only the outside walls which remain fenced off and abandoned.

Images from February 2015 show what the interior looked like before it was burnt out:  Report – – Loxley Methodist Church, Sheffield – March 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk. (Despite the URL, it was never a Methodist church.)

The Friends of Loxley Cemetery was founded in 2019 to maintain the graveyard, safeguard the ruined chapel and take responsibility for the congregation’s records.  They’ve worked hard to clear the badly overgrown burial ground and reveal a remarkable collection of monuments and gravestones.  The back page of the Friends’ publicity leaflet shows the impact they’ve had on the site:  folc-publicity-leaflet-dec-202 (e-voice.org.uk).

At least twenty-two people who perished in the Great Sheffield Flood are buried at Loxley, and there are fourteen war burials – military graves from both World Wars and that of an air-raid warden killed in the Sheffield Blitz.

There are also two memorials to victims of the respective tragedies of the Titanic (1912) and the Lusitania (1915).

A bird’s eye view of Loxley Cemetery is available at Loxley Chapel and Cemetery filmed by drone in February 2023 – YouTube.

The Friends welcome visitors and volunteer helpers:  News Events – Friends of Loxley Cemetery (e-voice.org.uk).

The Sounding Arch

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Great Western Railway: Maidenhead Railway Bridge, Berkshire/Buckinghamshire

While Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s pioneering Wharncliffe Viaduct was under construction in the early stages of building the Great Western Railway from 1836, he was simultaneously engaged on a more audacious project, the Maidenhead Viaduct, where the line needed to cross the River Thames.

The Thames Navigation Commissioners were adamant that the river channel and both towpaths must not be obstructed, yet Brunel was determined to restrict the ruling gradient of the railway to 1 in 1,320 (0.076%). 

He located the crossing to take advantage of a midstream island, Bucks Ait, that could accommodate a bridge pier, and designed two brickwork spans, each 128 feet long, that rose only 24 feet in height.  The arches remain the flattest brick spans ever constructed.

The GWR directors lacked Brunel’s confidence in his design, especially after the contractor, William Chadwick, lowered the centring before the mortar had fully set, and the lower courses of the eastern arch dropped half an inch. 

Chadwick took responsibility and reinstated the brickwork, but Brunel was ordered to leave the centring in place when trains began to cross the bridge in July 1839.

His response was to quietly lower the timberwork a few inches, so that arches were self-supporting, while insisting that they remain in situ over the coming winter.  Brunel’s biographer, L T C Rolt, wryly observes, “The suspicion that this was due not so much to excessive caution as to an impish sense of humour is hard to resist.”

Indeed, when an autumn storm destroyed the centring and the bridge remained firm, Brunel’s critics were silenced.

The artist J M W Turner depicted the Maidenhead Viaduct in his painting ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ (1844), the first time a railway train had been portrayed in a sophisticated work of art.

The Maidenhead Viaduct remains almost exactly as it was built, except that it was widened in 1877 by Sir John Fowler, who took great trouble to preserve the proportions of Brunel’s design, though he used darker Cattybrook brick from Gloucestershire.  When the broad-gauge tracks were removed in 1892 the line was quadrupled. 

Similar care to preserve the beauty of Brunel’s engineering was taken when the line was electrified in 2017.

Oddly, when the viaduct was listed in 1950 only the western arch was designated Grade II*;  the eastern arch was added to the designation in 1985.  The entire bridge was upgraded to Grade I in 2012.

The name “The Sounding Arch” arose because of the spectacular echo.  If you stand underneath the arch on the Taplow towpath and clap, you may be rewarded with six or more echoes.  People on TripAdvisor complain that there isn’t an echo.  People complaining on TripAdvisor is not uncommon.

Bridge over Brent

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Great Western Railway: Wharncliffe Viaduct, Hanwell, London

The rail journey from Paddington to Bristol tells the story of the start of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s spectacular career as a civil engineer.  He was thirty when construction of the Great Western Railway began in 1836, and he barely stopped working until he died, worn out, at fifty-three in 1859.

The first major structure out of Paddington, the Wharncliffe Viaduct, carries trains 66 feet above the valley of the River Brent on eight graceful arches.

Otherwise known as the Hanwell Viaduct, it’s named as a compliment to James Stuart-Wortley, 1st Baron Wharncliffe (1776-1845), who chaired the parliamentary committee that considered and approved the passage of the Great Western Railway Act (1835).  His lordship’s coat of arms embellishes the south face of the viaduct.

Opened in 1838, it’s not the first major railway viaduct – George Stephenson’s Sankey Viaduct in Lancashire dates from 1830 – but it can claim a fistful of other firsts.

It was Brunel’s first major civil-engineering project, yet with audacious confidence he designed it as the first bridge in the world to have hollow piers, saving cost without sacrificing structural strength. 

The interiors of the piers are a favourite roost for colonies of bats, whose privacy is carefully safeguarded by naturalists.

Brunel saw the potential of Sir Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke’s new electric telegraph, and persuaded them to lay down experimental telegraph cables alongside the track.  The system proved practical in 1839, making Hanwell the first viaduct in the world to carry a commercial telegraph.  The system was opened to the public in 1843.

This proved invaluable when a suspected murderer, John Tawell, was identified as he boarded a train at Slough and a telegraph message, describing him as “a Kwaker [sic] with a brown great coat on which reaches his feet” and locating his first-class compartment, was passed to Paddington station.  He was duly arrested when he alighted on New Year’s Day 1845.

Queen Victoria travelled by train for the first time from Windsor to London on June 13th 1842, and on at least one occasion is said to have ordered a stop on the viaduct so she could admire the view.

Brunel designed it to carry two broad-gauge tracks, and in 1877 a duplicate set of arches were added to the north side to carry a third line.  The abolition of the broad gauge in 1892 enabled the viaduct to carry four standard-gauge tracks. 

The viaduct continues to prove useful as technology develops.  It now carries transatlantic telephone and latterly fibre-optic cables and overhead power-lines to propel electric trains.

It became one of the first structures in Britain to be listed as a building of architectural and historic importance in 1949, and was commended by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England for its “architectural panache”:  its tapered piers are capped by stone cornices that carried the timber centering that supported the arches during construction.

The Wharncliffe Viaduct is easily accessible from Hanwell station, which is now served solely by the Elizabeth Line.  On arrival from London turn right out of the station and head towards the A4060 Uxbridge Road.  Continue away from London to Brent Meadow, an open space beside the Viaduct pub, which until Brunel came along was the eighteenth-century Coach & Horses.  Footpaths lead directly to the viaduct.

Exploring Turin:  Mole Antonelliana

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Mole Antonelliana, Turin, Italy

The tallest and easily the most preposterous building in Turin is the Mole Antonelliana, which towers over its surroundings and is visible from all quarters.

It’s named after its architect, Alessandro Antonelli (1798-1888);  the Italian word ‘mole’, which has two syllables, translates as “something of great size”.

The project began as a synagogue, initiated in the short period (1860-64) that Turin, as capital of the former kingdom of Sardinia, had become the capital of the newly united Kingdom of Italy.  The Jewish congregation wished to construct a place of worship that befitted the capital city.

For that reason they engaged Antonelli, who as a professor of the city’s Albertina Academy of Fine Arts (Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti) had built much in Turin.

However, it seems that when the capital moved to Rome in 1864 some members of the congregation followed it, reducing the numbers and the fund-raising capacity of those who remained in Turin.

Alessandro Antonelli had an obsession with building high:  given the opportunity he contrived structures out of all proportion to practical need, simply to make them prominent at a distance.  He provided a design to raise the campanile of the Basilica of San Gaudenzio in Novara, and if the Turin congregation had taken a close look at the Novara project they might have saved themselves much trouble. 

The basilica’s campanile was begun in 1844 but construction was interrupted by the First Italian War of Independence in 1848-49.  Antonelli proposed to extend the total height to 397 feet in 1855:  Alessandro Antonelli’s Basilica of San Gaudenzio — On Verticality;  Alessandro Antonelli cupola di S. Gaudenzio Novara – Category:San Gaudenzio (Novara) – Dome – Wikimedia Commons.  After continuing arguments over cost and stability, the cupola was resumed in 1881 and completed in 1887.  Concerns about its strength have persisted:  indeed, it was closed for ten years from 1937 for fear of a possible collapse.  It still stands, and is pronounced safe.

In Turin, the Jewish congregation set aside a budget of 250,000 lire for a design which, when Antonelli designed a dome and cupola rising to 400 feet, would cost 280,000 lire.  Construction began in 1863, but the architect’s further modifications, to achieve a height of 550 feet, exhausted both the budget and the clients’ patience.  Construction paused in 1869 with a temporary roof.

The congregation eventually walked away in 1876 when costs reached 692,000 lire, but Torinese civic pride dictated that this extravagant structure could not be dismantled at even greater expense.

The solution was to exchange the site of the Mole for a location in San Salvario close to Porta Nuova Station where the Jews erected the Great Synagogue (Tempio Grande) in four years flat (1880-84):  Torino-Sinagoga – Synagogue of Turin – Wikipedia.  Enrico Petiti’s Moorish exterior still exists, though the interior was bombed in 1942 and entirely replaced in 1945-49:  Great Synagogue of Turin – Tempio Grande – Synagogues360 (anumuseum.org.il).

The Mole was completed in 1869, the year after Antonelli’s death.

This huge edifice served as the Museum of the Italian Risorgimento (Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano) until the museum was relocated to the Palazzo Carignano in 1938.  Since 2000 it has housed the National Museum of Cinema (Museo Nazionale del Cinema).

Travellers in Italy who pay in cash may be familiar with the Mole Antonelli.  It appears on the two-cent Italian Euro coin:  Eur.it.002 – 2 euro cent coin – Wikipedia.

Cotton College

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Cotton College & St Wilfrid’s Church, Staffordshire

In the heady days following the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury readily opened his cheque-book for schemes to further the cause of Catholicism in Britain.

He bought an estate at Cotton, a couple of miles north of Alton Towers in 1843.  It seems that he intended it as a residence for his nephew and heir, Bertram, and planned a road (only partly constructed) linking Cotton to Alton Towers.

His plan changed three years later, when the Earl offered the Hall to Father William Faber (1814-1863), who with a group of eleven followers had founded a community called the Brothers of the Will of God.

Father Faber was devout, energetic and incorrigible.  Always in uncertain health, he drove himself to accomplish God’s work, while following an erratic path from his Calvinist upbringing and his Anglican ordination to his conversion to Catholicism.

His small band of followers immediately began to construct, largely by their own hands, a Catholic church designed by A W N Pugin and dedicated to their patron saint, St Wilfrid, and a small school, even though there were no local Catholics apart from members of the Lord Shrewsbury’s retinue.

Though Pugin is always credited with the design, with its elegant broach spire, it’s unlikely that he had much to do with the interior:  he would have disapproved of the west gallery in which the choir sat until the late 1930s. 

Pugin intended the church to have “the only perfect chancel in England and with an East window he could die for” but it was never built.  The existing chancel and vestries were designed in 1936-37 by George Drysdale.

Faber felt strongly attracted to the Oratorians, an order firmly wedded to an urban ministry, and Faber resolved to leave Cotton to found what eventually became the London Oratory on Brompton Road in Kensington.

St Wilfrid’s Church was opened on Easter Tuesday, April 25th 1848, and in October of that year the forty Oratorians, led by Father (later Cardinal) John Newman, took up residence at Cotton Hall. 

Three months later, on January 30th 1849, they moved on to a disused gin distillery in Birmingham which became the basis of the Birmingham Oratory.

Lord Shrewsbury was not best pleased that Cotton had been abandoned, although a priest remained to continue the mission and the bishop confirmed 125 parishioners in October 1850. 

The Earl offered the Hall buildings to another religious group, the Passionists, who arrived on December 15th 1850.  They failed to settle at Cotton:  parish attendances rapidly declined – one writer described the locals as “loaves and fishes” Catholics – and the order failed to attract novices. 

The death of the 16th Earl in 1852 meant that financial support dried up, and by 1856 the order had moved on, heavily in debt, leaving the parish under the direct and remote supervision of the diocese of Birmingham and making the other Cotton buildings redundant.

The eventual solution was the transfer of Sedgeley Park School, a long-established Catholic institution dating from 1763, from its unsatisfactory premises on the southern outskirts of Wolverhampton. 

St Wilfrid’s Church and the preparatory department of the school opened on St Wilfrid’s Day 1868, and the rest of the school followed in 1873.  An initial building programme of 1874-75 was extended in 1886-87 and again in 1931-32. 

Financial pressure caused the closure of Cotton College in 1987.  Dry rot was discovered in the church in 2009, and the final Mass was celebrated on October 24th 2010.

The archdiocese stripped the interior of the Grade-II listed church so that it and the college buildings could converted to residential accommodation by the Amos Group:  St Wilfrid’s Church – Amos Group Ltd;  Cotton College – Amos Group Ltd.

Lives at the Edge

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Kirk Edge Convent boundary wall, High Bradfield, Sheffield

The high road from the northern Sheffield suburbs to the village of High Bradfield is called Kirk Edge Road.  Beyond the playing fields of Bradfield School, which are protected by a sturdy windbreak of trees, there is nothing but an expanse of green fields.  Until the 1950s this was heather-coloured moorland, yet it’s still both bleak and beautiful.

There are no roadside buildings.  Isolated farms, one of them called Spitewinter, are situated for shelter on south-facing slopes at a distance.  After about 1½ miles travelling west, a substantial stone wall encloses trees which hide the Kirk Edge Convent, a community of Carmelite nuns, which bears the formal title Carmel of the Holy Spirit.  (The name “Carmel” derives from Mount Carmel in Palestine, where the original founders of the order settled in the thirteenth century.)

It’s easy to drive past the place without realising it’s there.  The modest lodge at the entrance gives no information about its name or purpose.

There was nothing on the site when Henry, 15th Duke of Norfolk acquired the Kirk Edge estate in 1869 for the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul to set up a boys’ industrial school with the unrealistic aim of teaching them agriculture on a patch of uncleared moorland. 

The architect Matthew Ellison Hadfield designed a building resembling a Parisian town house with high ceilings and large windows that was entirely unsuitable for a site eleven hundred feet above sea level on the edge of the Pennines.  It was completed in 1871 and later extended with a west wing and chapel in 1885, by which time it had become an orphanage for up to two hundred girls.

Water-supply was a problem:  well-water was hand-pumped to a tank in the roof space alongside a second rainwater tank, both of which froze solid in winter.  Gales blew slates off the roof and snow lingered for weeks.  The Duke of Norfolk provided coal, brought by cart from his collieries in Sheffield.  The girls left in 1887.

For a brief period in 1900-01 the Liverpool priest Father Nugent brought boys from his orphanage to Kirk Edge.  They too didn’t stay and the site remained unused except for providing summer holidays for poor Sheffield children until 1911 when the Duke, whose sister was a Carmelite nun, offered it to her order.

The Duke provided the nuns with improved facilities, including a new chapel, a windmill to pump the well-water and the boundary wall that provided the enclosure which their vocation required, but their living conditions were arduous until mains electricity was supplied in 1956 and mains water in 1964.

As far as possible the Convent was self-sufficient.  The sisters each maintained a patch of garden to produce fruit and vegetables, and grew flowers for decoration.  The Norfolk estate, and latterly a Sheffield businesswoman, provided food supplies, and the Convent attracted donations and discounts from the local community and Catholic supporters farther afield.

It’s difficult for people living ordinary lives, whether they’re religious or not, to understand the fervent attraction of monastic life in a closed order, free of distractions from focusing on the Almighty. 

A postulant who visited Kirk Edge in 2012 provided an online illustrated description of the sisters and their routine of worship, contemplation and recreation:  My Personal Visit Experience at Kirk Edge Carmel – Part I | Carmel, Garden of God and My Visit Experience to Kirk Edge Carmel – Part II | Carmel, Garden of God.

The inexorable decline in the number of postulants has obliged the sisters to close the Convent and move elsewhere, and the buildings are up for sale.  For the first time there are images in the public domain that indicate the quality of Miles Hadfield’s buildings, which are not listed:  28 bedroom character property for sale in High Bradfield, Bradfield, Sheffield, S6.

Whoever takes over the property will need a supply of shovels, grit and thermal underwear, without doubt.