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 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).