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 Miles 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.

The Mouse Man

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Robert Thompson workshop, Kilburn, North Yorkshire

Robert Thompson (1876-1955) was the son of a North Yorkshire joiner, also called Robert Thompson, whose forward-thinking mind inclined him to send his son to serve an engineering apprenticeship in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire.  At the end of five years young Robert nevertheless joined his father’s business as a carpenter, yet his heart was in studying and practising the craft skills he’d discovered in the medieval woodwork of Ripon Cathedral during his travels between his home village of Kilburn and the West Riding.

Robert aspired to the ideals of craft production and disliked the mechanical rigour of industrial design.  Alongside the business of serving his clients’ practical requirements in an agricultural community he quietly built up the means to pursue his craft, laying down oak timber to be seasoned in the old way in the fresh air for up to five years.

One of the most distinctive features of his work is the use of the adze, rather than a modern plane, to create a distinctive dappled effect on timber surfaces.

A commission from Father Paul Nevill of Ampleforth College for an oak crucifix for the college cemetery (1919) established his reputation for ambitious woodwork of fine quality.  From the initial commissions that followed he quickly adopted his trademark of carving a tiny mouse in some unobtrusive part of each piece, representing his motto of “industry in quiet places”.

There are Robert Thompson mice all over North Yorkshire and much farther afield, on furniture and fittings in churches, pubs, commercial buildings, houses, schools and colleges.

Roy Hattersley, writing an obituary for another outstanding craftsman, David Mellor (1930-2009), quoted William Morris’s precept “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Robert Thompson lived his life on the basis of that principle, and left a business that continues to thrive in the hands of four of his great-grandsons.

If you’re in the region of the Hambleton Hills, find your way to Kilburn and take a look at Robert Thompson’s workshop, still in production:  Home (robertthompsons.co.uk).

And if you think to look at the price-list, sit down first:  Ecommerce Price List (robertthompsons.co.uk).

You get what you pay for.

Memorial to a much-loved bassist

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Andy Rourke mural, The Wheatsheaf, Oak Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester

Andy Rouke (1964-2023), the highly-regarded bass-player of the 1980s Manchester band The Smiths, died of pancreatic cancer, and the loss has had a huge impact on his fans and admirers.

Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, picked up his wife Bee’s suggestion of a wall mural as a way of commemorating Andy and his exceptional musical legacy.  He knew the exact image to capture his friend when they were both playing in the band, an image taken at the Caird Hall, Dundee by the photographer Nalinee Darmrong who had travelled with them on tour in 1985-86.  Other images from that time are at You’ve Got to See This Local Photographer’s Book About Her Teenage Years Touring With the Smiths – Washingtonian.

Mike Joyce recruited the Manchester muralist Akse P19 to render Nalinee Darmrong’s image in his precisely detailed manner.  His work has been enriching the local streetscape since 1992:  Akse P19 | Greater Mancunians. 

Andy Rourke frequented the Wheatsheaf pub on Oak Street in the Northern Quarter, and the current landlords, Robert Ashton and Lisa Booth, immediately offered the gable wall overlooking their car park with the approval of the building’s owner, Admiral Taverns.  Andy’s family gave their blessing to the project.

Against a black background, the 30 feet × 20 feet monochrome image is startling.  Nalinee Darmrong, who travelled from Washington DC to see the finished mural, characterised it as “hard to see, but…also beautiful to see”, “bittersweet but amazing”:  ‘Incredible’ mural of The Smiths legend Andy Rourke unveiled on side of Manchester pub – Manchester Evening News.

Mike Rourke’s crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with Pancreatic Cancer Action Network raised nearly £29,000:  Andy Rourke of The Smiths mural – a Creative & Arts crowdfunding project in Manchester by Mike Joyce. 

More information about this form of cancer can be found at Pancreatic Cancer UK – We bring more than hope and donations can be made to Donate to Pancreatic Cancer UK – Pancreatic Cancer UK.

Putting the heart in the city

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Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2010) © Mike Higginbottom
Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2024) © Hasna Khan

Leah’s Yard, so long unrecognised except by historians and industrial archaeologists, is at last established as the jewel in the crown of Sheffield’s game-changing Heart of the City development.

In an astute comment to an article in the Sheffield Tribune in October 2023, Robin Hughes pointed out that the prehistory of Heart of the City goes back to the 1960s when Sheffield City Council decided not to demolish much of the city centre to accommodate a ring road inside the inner ring road and awarded the flagship retail site on Cambridge Street to what was then Cole Brothers. 

Subsequent development schemes came and went, yet the beauty of Heart of the City, led by the Director of City Centre Development, Nalin Seneviratne from 2017, is its piecemeal but coherent configuration, which has respected many though not all the surviving heritage buildings.

Most people who think about it would describe Leah’s Yard as a set of “little mesters” workshops, where the myriad small craftsmen worked together in close co-operation at their highly specialised metal trades for which Sheffield has been celebrated for centuries.

In fact, in its early days Leah’s Yard belonged to single occupants, initially a toolmaker, George Linley, who occupied the site in either 1817 or 1825.  By 1842 it had become John Morton’s Coalpit Lane Horn Works, making handles for cutlery and knives.

(The coal pit was an outcrop where Furnival Gate now runs.  Coalpit Lane was renamed when the Duke of Cambridge laid the foundation stone of the Crimea Monument at the top of The Moor in 1857.)

The works remained a horn manufactory until a die-stamper, Henry Leah, took over in 1891.

The Leahs found they had more room than they needed for their business and let space to up to eighteen different tradesmen at one time.  By the beginning of the twentieth century Leah’s Yard was indeed a little mesters’ workplace.

Henry Leah’s son, grandson and great-grandson successively ran the place until 1976 when their business was amalgamated with Spear & Jackson.

The site was listed Grade II* in 1983 for its rarity and completeness.  This presented difficulties for development planners and arguably ensured that the heritage buildings around Cambridge Street should be incorporated in the new build.

Leah’s Yard had no future as a museum piece, and the patina of grime and grit has had to go.  I’m told that the restoration had more latitude than would have been possible in a historically accurate recreation.

Scrubbed up but outwardly intact, managed by local entrepreneurs James O’Hara and Tom Wolfenden, Leah’s Yard is already proving a magnet for high-end retailers and small businesses:  the digital news outlet Tribune has relocated to the Yard, as has the podcast creator Persephonica.

Leah’s Yard preserves a precious though not unique piece of Sheffield’s heritage, echoing the diversity of the industrial past.

Its significance deserves light-touch interpretative displays so that visitors can discover the meaning of the place.

Meanwhile, the planners’ next dilemma sits across the road, where the former Cole Brothers store is waiting for a fresh purpose.

Crossing the Forth

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Forth Bridge

I admire the video-maker Geoff Marshall, the anoraks’ anorak, for his voluminous YouTube documentaries about transport, delivered with clarity and relentless enthusiasm.  He’s a natural communicator, with the gift of talking about things that interest him in a way that appeals to listeners.  And his appetite for challenges means that he makes curiosities entertaining.

His recent piece about the Forth Bridge [I Went To The Top Of The Forth Bridge (youtube.com)] is typical of his work.  His reputation gives him access to the parts other enthusiasts can’t reach, and his videos are technically professional.  Watch for the electric kettle switching itself off on cue.

Until the rail bridge was built, the only way to cross the Firth of Forth between Fife and Lothian without going all the way upstream to Stirling was by ferry.  An 1818 scheme for a suspension bridge was dismissed by a critic because its “very light and slender appearance, [was] so light indeed that on a dull day it would hardly have been visible, and after a heavy gale probably no longer to be seen on a clear day either”.  The engineer Thomas Bouch began a rail suspension bridge (never a good idea) in 1878, but when his earlier Tay Bridge collapsed the following year – “badly designed, badly constructed and badly maintained” – the Forth project was immediately stopped.

The eventual Forth Bridge is an astonishing piece of engineering, a design made possible only by the availability of Bessemer steel, so big and powerful that its form expresses its function, the first unequivocally utilitarian structure in Britain since Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851.  Unlike Horace Jones’ London Tower Bridge (1886-94), the Forth Bridge couldn’t be dressed up as architecture.

Its cantilever design ensures its strength and safety.  The central cantilever was the largest in the world when it was constructed;  now it’s the second largest, overtaken in 1919 by the Quebec Bridge (Pont de Québec] in Canada [Pont de Québec vu du Parc aquarium du Québec – Quebec Bridge – Wikipedia].

It was never strictly true that the painters started at one end and when they’d finished went back to start again. 

There was a tunnel under the Forth, built upstream to connect Kinneil Colliery near Bo’ness with Valleyfield Colliery near Culross in Fife.  It operated from 1964 to 1982 and was filled in and capped when it closed.  The tunnel features for a few seconds at 3:19 in the film Forth – Powerhouse for industry (1964):  Full record for ‘FORTH – POWERHOUSE FOR INDUSTRY’ (1820) – Moving Image Archive catalogue (nls.uk).

There’s a comprehensive account of the Forth Bridge and the two later road bridges at The Forth Bridge (theforthbridges.org).  It’s incorrect to refer to the “Forth Rail Bridge”.  The rail crossing has historical precedence, opened in 1890:  it was followed by the Forth Road Bridge (1964) and the Queensferry Crossing (2017).

Geoff Marshall makes it possible to appreciate the sheer scale of the Forth Bridge by taking his camera to the top of a cantilever and climbing around the rail deck.  Sooner him than me:  I’m glad of his movie;  otherwise I’m content to cross the Forth Bridge in a comfortable seat on a train – as its designers intended.

However, it will soon be possible to enjoy views of the Firth of Forth at 367 feet above sea level, and to join a Bridge Walk, secured by the same sort of harness that makes it possible to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge:  Forth Bridge Experience (scotlandsrailway.com).

Utopian community

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Dartington, Devon: Henry Moore ‘Memorial Figure’, Dartington Church and Hall

Dartington Hall, north of Totnes in Devon, celebrates its centenary as a community in 2025.  It’s a magical place, where people of talent have created, educated and influenced life and culture in Britain and beyond in all manner of fascinating ways.

It grew from the vision of Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) and his wife Dorothy (1887-1968), who purchased the decrepit estate, with its grand house dating back to 1338, to found a charity dedicated to encouraging all forms of art, sustainable agriculture, social science and peace.

Dorothy Elmhirst belonged to the Whitney family, which had settled in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and became fabulously wealthy after Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, transforming the economy of the slave-based cotton industry in the Southern states.  She inherited $15 million dollars at the age of seventeen.  She and her husband wanted for nothing, and sincerely wanted to make the world a better place.

Leonard was descended from a long line of Yorkshire gentry.  After service in the First World War and subsequent study in the USA, he met the Bengali poet, artist, social reformer and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and followed him to India as his secretary.  Together they founded an Institute of Rural Reconstruction in West Bengal.

When Leonard and Dorothy married in 1925, Tagore, who had travelled extensively in England, encouraged them to invest in the ideas of the Chinese-based Rural Reconstruction Movement and may have suggested Dartington Manor as a suitable site.

The Elmhirsts lost no time in improving the estate, employing the architect William Weir (1865-1950) to restore and adapt the existing buildings, including the Great Hall which had stood roofless for over a century.  Dorothy Elmhirst worked with the garden designers Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane to transform the gardens.

The weaver Elizabeth Peacock created the wall-hangings for the Great Hall between 1930 and 1938.  The architect Walter Gropius adapted the interior of the Barn Theatre in 1935, in preparation for Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton, to start the Dartington Theatre School the following year.  The Henry Moore sculpture ‘Memorial Figure’ was installed in the grounds in 1947.

A cluster of practical and educational projects grew up and were placed under an umbrella organisation, the Dartington Hall Trust, in 1935.  All of them have adapted over the years, and some have closed down or moved away – the progressive Dartington Hall School (1926), the Dartington Hall Film Unit (1945), the Dartington International Summer School and music festival (1953), the Dartington College of Arts (1961), Dartington Glass (1967;  divested and renamed Dartington Crystal 1986) and the ecology-focused Schumacher College (1990).

The roll-call of prominent artists and innovators associated with Dartington is remarkable, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s initial visit in 1926.  Paul Robeson rehearsed his 1930 production of Othello at Dartington.  The potter Bernard Leach was involved in Dartington from its earliest days and taught there from 1932.  The influential dancer and teacher Rudolf von Laban arrived from Nazi Germany in 1938 and contributed to Dartington programmes until 1951.

The composer Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, taught at summer schools between 1942 and 1951.  Benjamin Britten conducted his cantata St Nicolas in the Great Hall in 1949, the year after it was completed, and Igor Stravinsky visited the 1957 Summer School.

One of the most influential figures associated with Dartington was the sociologist and writer Michael Young, latterly Baron Young of Dartington, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old pupil at the School in 1929, was a Trustee for fifty years, 1942-1992, and wrote the history of the Trust, entitled The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the creation of an utopian community (1982).

The Dartington estate is a delightful place to visit, whether for a few hours or a few days, either to attend an event or simply be there:  Visit Dartington Trust: events, courses, walks, food and drink & more.

Victory over Blindness

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'Victory over Blindness', Piccadilly Station, Manchester
‘Victory over Blindness’, Piccadilly Station, Manchester

If you’re running to catch a train on the approach to Manchester Piccadilly station you may have to swerve out of the path of a line of soldiers in First World War uniforms.

The seven life-sized bronze figures are blind veterans, each following the leader by placing their hands on the shoulders of the man in front.  The leader wears a patch over one eye, suggesting that he may have sight in the other eye.

The group is a cast of Johanna Domke-Guyot’s statue ‘Victory over Blindness’, deliberately placed at ground level to engage the attention of passers-by, as a reminder of the sacrifices of the soldiers blinded in combat by artillery or gas.

Ms Domke-Guyot has experienced partial sight-loss since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994.  She chose to mount the group without a plinth “…because it means that a disabled or blind person can access it.  I want people to touch it;  I want it to be a people’s artwork.”

The original statue, completed in 2015, is located at the Llandudno Centre of Blind Veterans UK, which subsequently commissioned the Manchester cast, unveiled in 2018.

The charity, for a long time known as St Dunstan’s, was co-founded in 1915 by Sir Arthur Pearson (1866-1921), the first proprietor of the Daily Express, who had himself lost his sight through glaucoma.  Under its original name, The Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Care Committee, the charity aimed to provide sightless veterans with vocational training so they could live independent lives.

Sir Arthur’s 1919 memoir was entitled Victory Over Blindness: How it Was Won by the Men of St Dunstan’s.

The Blind Veterans UK website Blind Veterans UK, Rebuilding lives after sight loss – Blind Veterans UK portrays the continuing work of the charity in helping blinded veterans, irrespective of whether they lost their sight in action, to “regain their independence and live the life they choose”.

Wagon hoists

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Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds
Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds

The centrepiece of Leeds’ Wellington Place development is called Tower Square, because its unlikely landmark is a rare survival of Victorian railway technology, one of a pair of towers that housed hoists to move freight wagons up and down between the now-demolished viaduct approaching Central Station and ground level.

Built in 1850, the Leeds Central Wagon Hoist is now celebrated.  Thanks to the developer MEPC investing £1.5 million the derelict Grade II listed rarity has been turned into a free-entry mini-museum which tells the story of the defunct railway line and the vanished passenger station that closed in 1967.

This Yorkshire Post feature illustrates how much the site has changed – Leeds Central Station: What remains of Leeds city centre’s ‘other’ train station (yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk) – and the attractive displays inside the tower are enlivened with a soundscape of departure announcements and passing trains.

As far as I can discover, there are only two other surviving wagon hoists in Britain. 

One is easily viewed from Platform 8 of Huddersfield railway station.  Attached to the Grade II listed goods warehouse dating from 1885, this hoist is supported by cast-iron Doric columns and it seems that the lifting equipment remains.  An urban-explorer report dated 2015 shows the spacious empty interior but the photographer either couldn’t find or didn’t recognise the interest of the hoist:  Report – – LNWR/LYR Goods Warehouse, Huddersfield – April 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk.

The other, also listed Grade II, is at Goole in East Yorkshire:  Coal Wagon Hoist, Railway Dock © David Dixon :: Geograph Britain and Ireland.

There are archive images of other wagon-hoists, no longer in existence, at –

The only moving-image footage I can find to show a wagon-hoist in action is a twenty-second clip in a documentary about freight transport in Sheffield:  Sheffields railway in the 60`s – YouTube (start at 5:12).  This footage, apparently dated 1966, lacks a title or credits, and explains why, with hindsight, the well-intentioned modernisation of archaic operating practices didn’t stand the test of time. Railway goods sheds and stations aren’t given as much attention as passenger stations, civil engineering works and rolling stock, but they are amply covered in John Minnis and Simon Hickman’s The Railway Goods Shed and Warehouse in England (Historic England 2016), free to download at Goods Sheds 140pp.indd (historicengland.org.uk).