Rawtenstall Station, East Lancashire Railway: British Railways locomotive 33109
Volunteers are the life-blood of heritage organisations, nowhere more so than on the labour-intensive steam railways.
I visited the East Lancashire Railway [http://www.eastlancsrailway.org.uk] on a freezing January day, an unforgiving time of year when tourists stay at home.
Nevertheless, the ELR was running their Blue Timetable, a
full service using two trains, one hauled by steam, the other by diesel. The ticket-office, shop, stations, cafés and
the trains themselves were fully staffed and operational.
As we travelled above the snow-line to Rawtenstall, we
passed a tracklaying crew, clad in hi-vis jackets, sorting out a siding in
billowing snow.
The twelve-mile ELR route actually encompasses two former
rail routes out of Bury – north via
Ramsbottom to Rawtenstall, and east to Heywood where a link is planned to
Castleton to join the Network Rail route from Manchester to Rochdale and
beyond.
The railway also runs the over-stuffed Bury Transport Museum in the goods shed behind Bury Bolton Street station and offers a wide-ranging events programme from on-board dining to train-driving experiences, from days out with Thomas the Tank Engine to guided rail ale trails.
All this is made possible by a small army of volunteers –
there must have been nearer a hundred than fifty on a quiet day – giving the
most valuable thing they have, their time.
The satisfaction they gain from working a traditional railway and
serving the public must be considerable:
they could just as easily stay at home and watch television.
Those of us who simply pay our fare, buy refreshments and
maybe take home a souvenir are in a small way supporting their venture, and we
shouldn’t take for granted the hidden value of the volunteers that turn out
regardless to make the railway function.
A highlight of my week in Sydney in 2017 was an exercise in the Heineken effect – reaching the parts other tours can’t reach. Patrick O’Neill, who I had met while working for Sydney ADFAS in 2011, offered to take me to places in Sydney I had not myself discovered.
He picked me up at 10.00am and drove me around central Sydney pointing out landmarks and drawing my particular attention to the Sydney Observatory [https://maas.museum/sydney-observatory] which, like the old observatory at Greenwich, was built for navigational purposes as much as astronomical exploration. It was designed by Alexander Dawson and completed in 1858. Its primary function was to operate a time-ball precisely at 1pm so that ships in line of sight could synchronise the chronometers they needed to navigate accurately. A cannon fired simultaneously from Fort Denison, an island in mid-harbour, provided a time-signal to ships in coves further away.
Paddington, once rough and deprived and threatened with post-war clearance, is now gentrified. On the way, along Oxford Street, Patrick pointed out that I should seek an opportunity to visit Victoria Barracks: http://www.armymuseumnsw.com.au.
Part way along Oxford Street, next to the impressive Paddington Town Hall (1890-91) lies the remains of Paddington Reservoir (1866), one of Sydney’s numerous underground water-supply storage reservoirs: https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/explore/facilities/parks/major-parks/paddington-reservoir-gardens. It ceased to function in 1899, and was adapted as a garage until part of the roof gave way in 1990. It was then adapted as an intriguing public garden which opened in 2008.
Patrick drove down street after street of small terraced houses, with balconies and ironwork, once the homes of artisans, and later post-war immigrants, and now changing hands for remarkable amounts of money. The area is awash with hotels, art galleries and high-end retail outlets. The pavements of some streets are lined with fig trees, which look both attractive and curious, and must be a problem to high-sided vehicles because their branches spread diagonally from the trunk.
We cut through a sequence of inner-city suburbs – Surry Hills and Redfern, where the New South Wales Government Railways workshops were sited – to Newtown where Patrick and his artist wife Stella live, to drink very fine coffee in very fine cups under the veranda at the back of the house. Over the garden wall is St Michael and all the Angels Cathedral, the seat of the Melkite Greek Catholic Eparchy of Saint Michael Archangel in Sydney, essentially an orthodox group in communion with Rome.
Then we explored Newtown – Hollis Park, a sequence of residential streets with a synagogue, which Patrick thinks indicates the religion of the original developer, and the main shopping street and former tram-route, King Street, picking off the Trocadero Ballroom (1889) [http://sydneyarchitecture.com/INW/INW22.htm], a fine post office, a town hall and St Stephen’s Church (Edmund Blacket, 1874), which is surrounded by Camperdown Cemetery [https://www.neac.com.au/grounds-and-facilities/cemetery].
Much of the cemetery has been cleared, but I observed two curious nautical monuments which I later identified online – the anchor from Morts Dock commemorating the SS Collaroy which ran aground in 1881 and the detached pediment with a carved ship ploughing through the waves placed as a memorial to seamen, which came from either the old Maritime Services Building (c1850) or the former Harbour Trust Building, Circular Quay (c1902), depending which source you believe.
In the evening Patrick picked me up again and took me to dinner at home with Stella. As we drove down a main street he pointed out fruit bats in the sky, like a horror movie, and later we heard their cries as we were having dinner.
Nothing makes visiting a place more memorable than knowing hospitable locals.
One of the images in the ‘Sunlight’ series of my greetings-card range is a photographic fluke.
It was taken through the window of a moving train sometime in 1977. It exists as a 35mm colour slide, and has been gently buffed up by Photoshop.
The occasion was memorable.
In those days, most of my adult-education courses were based around transport history, and it was a good time to be teaching about trains.
Dr Beeching’s reshaping of Britain’s railways had been running for the past ten years, steam had gone, and a brave new world of high-speed intercity passenger services was on the horizon.
My classes in Derbyshire were often populated by retired railwaymen who could tell stories back to the 1930s, and sometimes by current rail employees who knew what was going on in the industry.
I had an invaluable contact in British Rail’s Sheffield office, a gentleman called George who was in charge of group travel and could pull all sorts of levers if I booked a dozen or more adult-ed students on a rail trip.
It was George who gave me access to the former Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras when it was most neglected – Grade I listed and nobody could think what to do with it.
When the spanking new High Speed Train (HST), later branded as Intercity 125, came on stream on the Great Western main line and the Cross Country route from the South West to the North East in 1977, George was able to provide us with tickets to travel on both lines on the same day, beginning on the Midland Main Line at Chesterfield (which was not then served by HSTs, though they came later).
We travelled south to St Pancras, hopped on the Underground to Paddington, sped down the Great Western to Bristol Temple Meads, and then returned all the way to Chesterfield.
It was somewhere on the last leg of the triangular journey, south of Birmingham, that I spotted the rainbow and lined it up with a passing cottage.
The HSTs were a new experience in travel, not only for their maximum speed of 125mph but for the air-conditioning and solid comfort of their Mark 3 carriages. Many of them are still in service, despite the fact that until recently they still had slam doors and direct discharge of lavatories on to the track.
I’ve written elsewhere about the designer Sir Kenneth Grange’s influence on the shape of the production HST, and about the export of the design to Australia, where it’s known as the XPT.
The HST was supposed to be a hastily-contrived stand-in for the tilting Advanced Passenger Train, which was aborted by British Rail and its technology sold to Fiat Ferrovia, only to return to Britain as the Pendolino in 2010.
Meanwhile, the HST has given many years of yeoman service, and hasn’t yet outlived its usefulness.
I was delighted to read, in the Methodist Church periodical The Connexion (Summer 2020), that Firth Park Methodist Church has put its attractive and expensive building to good use to ensure its long-term survival.
The Grade-II listed building is an essay in Perpendicular Gothic style by the Sheffield architects Frank W Chapman (1869-1933) and John Mansell Jenkinson (1883-1965), built of red brick with ashlar dressings and a slate roof. Its entrance front has a wide Perpendicular window, with twin turrets and a porch with twin entrance doors. The sides of the nave are buttressed and its roof carries an octagonal flèche.
It cost £4,000, of which £1,000 was bequeathed by John Cole, one of the three Cole Brothers who founded the city-centre department store.
The interior plan of the worship space was originally cruciform, with transepts and a chancel.
The foundation stone was laid on Saturday May 28th 1910, and the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of that date mentioned that the building would accommodate a congregation of three hundred and the ancillary facilities included a church parlour, minister’s vestry, choir vestry and kitchen.
The church opened on May 11th 1911, at a time when there were no other buildings nearby: Print details Picture Sheffield. It was affiliated to the United Methodist Church until the 1932 amalgamation which created the modern Methodist Church.
I’ve been told that in the early 1960s a property developer offered the congregation a deal whereby in exchange for the corner site on Stubbin Lane and Sicey Avenue, a brand-new chapel would be incorporated into a proposed supermarket.
The Methodists turned down this offer and instead the unlovely Paragon Cinema (1934), fifty yards up Sicey Avenue, was replaced by a supermarket and bowling alley.
Maintaining the building became increasingly difficult in the decades that followed, and a suspended ceiling was installed circa 1980 to make the place easier to heat.
As the Anglican congregation at St Hilda’s declined, there was talk of amalgamating in order to use one building instead of two, but when eventually St Hilda’s closed in 2007 the remaining members transferred to the Anglican parish church of St James & St Christopher, Shiregreen.
The Methodist congregation continued to flourish, however, and nowadays includes people of Caribbean heritage and from a number of African nations, especially Ghana, and former refugee families from Thailand. The former vestry now serves as a café and is used for Café Church.
To support its thriving programme of activities – youth groups, English as a Second Language groups, an entertainment group – the congregation visualises creating two separate spaces in the nave, and in February 2020 opened ‘Sam’s Space’, containing a substantial indoor soft play structure. In the five weeks before the pandemic lockdown forced it to close, an encouraging number of visitors crossed the threshold.
Sam’s Space isn’t only for kids. Rev Mark Goodhand’s article in The Connexion comments,–
It’s a meeting place for young children, parents, grandparents and carers. It’s a space that outside of soft play sessions will be used for wider conversations – fellowship groups, local councillors’ surgeries and school curriculum work. As the project has unfolded new opportunities for service have emerged. We hope to be involved with mental health work by using an open area attached to our building to provide raised beds for gardening. It’s a place where new expressions of worship will begin to be shaped by the community. This is exciting!
Every church is, of course, essentially the people who meet. The building is only bricks and mortar.
But it’s satisfying that – thanks to the vision of the Firth Park Methodists – the humdrum shopping centre of Firth Park will retain its only distinguished building.
Fountains Hall, North Yorkshire: memorial to Elizabeth and Charles Vyner
Fountains Hall is a quirky Jacobean house, built into a steep hillside, probably to a design by Robert Smythson, on the edge of the precinct of the medieval Fountains Abbey. Indeed, its stones came from the Abbey, plundered by the builder, the unlikeable Stephen Proctor, in the first decade of the seventeenth century.
Periods of neglect in its long history kept it intact and charming. In the late 1920s it was renovated by Commander Clare and Lady Doris Vyner and during the Second World War the house was used to accommodate evacuees.
The Vyners’ daughter Elizabeth joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service and died of lethargic encephalitis, or sleeping sickness, aged eighteen, on June 3rd 1942. Her death reminds us that not all the victims of war die by enemy action, but for their loved ones the loss is as great and the grief no less hard to bear.
Elizabeth Vyner’s younger brother, Charles De Grey Vyner, served as a pilot in the Royal Naval Reserve, and was reported missing in action when his plane crashed into the sea off Rangoon on May 2nd 1945. He was nineteen.
Word reached his family on May 12th. After the euphoria of VE Day on the 8th there could hardly have been a more cruel blow.
After the War Elizabeth and Charles’ parents erected a memorial, poignantly placed above the main door of the Hall, a stained-glass window flanked by carved figures of brother and sister in uniform. It was designed by John Seely and Paul Paget and was unveiled on April 9th 1953 by Elizabeth’s godmother, after whom she was named, HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
The memorial is visible only to visitors leaving the house, unless on entering they reach the top of the stairs and turn.
Its inscription reads, “When you go home tell them of us and say for your tomorrow we gave our today. From this their home, they went forth to war.”
Even though it’s popular with visitors, the Derbyshire village of Edale, tucked high in the valley of the River Noe, feels a long way out of the way.
It is referred to as “Aidale” in Domesday Book and under the Norman kings it became part of the Royal Forest of the Peak. From the reign of King John the Noe Valley comprised five Royal Farms, or “booths”, based on settlements at Upper Booth, Barber Booth, Ollerbrook Booth, Nether Booth and Grindsbrook Booth.
After royal control gave place in Tudor times to individual tenements, Grindsbrook Booth became the location of an inn dating back to the seventeenth century and the site of the parish church of Holy Trinity.
The first parish church here dated from 1633, but the present, third building was built in 1885-6, with a spire added four years later.
Cattle farming gave place to sheep, and in the late eighteenth century the valley was enclosed with the gritstone dry stone walls that are characteristic of the Dark Peak.
The village itself is 820 feet above sea level, and the hills round about rise to over 2,000 feet.
Nevertheless, though transport in any direction was arduous, a cotton mill was built on the site of a corn mill and tannery half a mile from the village in 1795.
Workers lived in a dormitory, on a site still known as Skinners Hall [https://www.cottageguide.co.uk/taylorscroft], and women workers came from Castleton, commuting on foot along the old coffin-trail over Hollins Cross.
The mill operated until 1934, and the Landmark Trust restored and converted it to apartments in the 1970s.
The railway eventually made the place accessible in 1894, and houses for prosperous Victorian incomers stand among older vernacular cottages.
The Nag’s Head pub, a former barn, is the formal southern beginning of the Pennine Way.
There was a possibility, shortly after the Second World War, that all this would be swept away, when in 1949 the Derwent Valley Water Board proposed to flood the Noe Valley to make a reservoir the same size of Ladybower (completed in 1945) with a dam 127 feet high and 1,750 feet long. The scheme would have involved burying the Dore-Chinley railway in a lengthy tunnel.
As an alternative suggestion, in the early 1950s the Board considered building a dam west of Castleton flooding the valley of the Odin Sitch below Mam Tor.
They then considered a series of schemes to raise the waters of the Upper Derwent Valley by a great dam which would submerge the existing dam at Derwent and leave only the towers of Howden Dam visible above the waters.
These schemes are described and illustrated in Brian Robertson’s book, Walls Across the Valley: the building of Howden and Derwent Dams (Scarthin Books 1993), pp 194-205.
Instead, in the 1980s, the Board’s successor, Severn-Trent, began Carsington Reservoir, which after some tribulations opened in 1992.
The Derwent High Dam proposal remains on the table. No-one nowadays seriously suggests flooding Edale.
View from Edale Station towards Cowburn Tunnel, Derbyshire
Edale is the last station for stopping westbound trains from Sheffield to Stockport and Manchester before the line plunges into Cowburn Tunnel (3,702 yards).
It serves the village of Edale (population 353) and is handy for walkers setting off on the Pennine Way.
The Hope Valley Line is notable, and rare among intercity railways in the North, because all its original stations remain open to passengers, and an hourly stopping service runs in between non-stop trains serving Norwich, Nottingham and Liverpool via Sheffield.
Edale station itself offers only basic facilities. British Rail replaced the original timber buildings with bus shelters, and eventually provided automatic ticket machines and digital information displays.
The Dore & Chinley Railway was opened in 1894 by the Midland Railway, providing a cross-country link between Sheffield and Manchester. It gained additional traffic when G & T Earle opened their cement works, served by a private branch railway, at Hope in 1929.
The cement works is an ambivalent factor in the economy of the Peak District National Park: it’s ugly and dirty, yet it provides jobs for the local community, and its rail connection helped to save the line in the 1960s.
Though the Woodhead route between Sheffield and Manchester via Penistone had been modernised and electrified after the Second World War, it had less social value as a passenger route, and after its coal traffic declined it closed in 1981.
The Hope Valley route offers an attractive ride through some of Derbyshire’s finest scenery, even though a quarter of the mileage is in tunnel.
Each of its stations provides access to interesting tourist sites and attractive walking country.
Hope station is isolated, but has bus services to Bradwell and Castleton; Bamford is within walking distance of Ladybower Reservoir and the Upper Derwent dams; Hathersage has an open-air swimming pool and the David Mellor Factory, and Grindleford boasts the best fry-up for miles around – as long as you don’t ask for mushrooms.
In the days of steam traction and non-corridor slam-door carriages, the last train back to Sheffield was nicknamed the “Passion Special”, apparently because the length of Totley Tunnel (6,230 yards) provided opportunities not commonly found in the decades before the Swinging Sixties.
In contrast, latter-day Sprinter units are passion killers.
The bleak, remote north-west of Derbyshire was in medieval times the Forest of High Peak, a royal preserve for deer, not much blessed with trees, but valuable for its minerals, particularly lead.
It was guarded by Peveril Castle, established by William the Conqueror’s favourite, William Peveril (c1040-c1115), though the earliest surviving structure is the keep erected in 1176, which dominates the town of Castleton that grew up outside its precinct.
Castleton is a tourist honeypot, rich in opportunities to eat, drink and buy souvenirs.
Apart from the Castle, the most significant historic buildings are the Church of St Edmund, with its box pews and six-hundred-volume library “to be lent out to the parishioners at the discretion of the minister”, the bequest of the bachelor vicar, Rev Frederick Farran (d 1817), and the seventeenth-century Castleton Hall, which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as “comically ignorant”.
Castleton is world-famous as the only home of the unique form of fluorspar, Blue John, known for its coloration (bleu-jaune), and now in short supply. Two of the largest artefacts of Blue John remain in the county at Chatsworth House and Renishaw Hall. Mrs Malaprop, in Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), refers to it as “Derbyshire putrefactions”.
There are four show caves, the result of mining activity going back to prehistoric times.
Peak Cavern, known in impolite times as the Devil’s Arse, is a natural opening fifty feet high and 114 feet wide, with enough space to contain a pub and several cottages (Celia Fiennes’ “poor little houses…thatch’d like little styes”) and, until well into the twentieth century, a ropewalk. Lord Byron visited it with his cousin, Mary Ann Chaworth, for whom he had feelings: lying in a boat with her to reach the innermost part of the cave, he wrote “I recollect my sensations but cannot describe them.” Princess Victoria visited the cave in 1834, and again, as Queen, in 1841.
Blue John Mine, now celebrated for its displays of stalagmites and stalactites, seems to have been mined since at least Roman times: two vases excavated at Pompeii appear to be made of Blue John.
Speedwell Mine is a mining tunnel begun in 1774 to transport lead and never profitable as such. In 1778, half a mile from the entrance, the miners broke into a natural cavern they named the Bottomless Pit, because all the waste thrown into it, estimated at 40,000 tons, simply disappeared. The ultimate length of the adit was 2,650ft, built at a cost of around £14,000. Only £3,000-worth of undressed ore was removed, and mining ceased around 1790, after which the Mine’s interest to tourists ensured its continuing maintenance to the present day.
Visitors reach the Bottomless Pit by boat, until recent years legged by the guide in narrow-boat fashion, the most exciting of the Castleton cave-experiences: the adit is 840 feet below the surface at the point where it crosses the Bottomless Pit; the water seventy-feet below the adit is up to thirty feet deep. The furthest point of exploration in the system, the Cliff Cavern, is over a mile from the entrance and six hundred feet below ground.
The Treak Cliff Cavern, which consists of old mine-workings leading to a series of caves newly-discovered in 1926, was opened to the public in 1935. It contains the only known workable vein of Blue John, and its stalagmite and stalactite displays are as spectacular as any others in the district.
The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
For most of the nineteenth century, demand for water supply in the borough of Leicester and its surrounding area left the waterworks company – and its successor Leicester Corporation – constantly chasing demand by increasing capacity.
The Leicester Waterworks Company was founded in 1846 and the following year secured an Act of Parliament to build a reservoir and treatment works at Thornton, to the west of the town.
The company struggled to attract capital until the Corporation promised to invest £17,000 of the required £80,000 in return for guarantees of a dividend of 4% per annum until 1883 and all the company’s net profits over 4½% for ever.
Thornton Reservoir began supplying up to 1.6 million gallons in 1853, but within ten years Leicester suffered two serious water shortages, in 1863 and 1864, and Leicester Corporation took shares in the company to finance the reservoir and pumping station at Cropston which opened in 1871.
When the Waterworks Company proposed to increase its capital further in 1874, the Corporation decided to purchase the company outright by means of an enabling Act in 1877.
The water level of Cropston Reservoir was raised to increase capacity in 1887, and in 1890 parliamentary powers were sought to establish another reservoir at Swithland.
A further severe water shortage in 1893 was relieved only by taking an emergency supply from Ellistown Colliery which customarily supplied Coalville, and construction of the new dam began the following year.
Swithland Reservoir was built at almost the same time as the Great Central Railway line to London, which crosses it on two viaducts. This stretch of railway now forms part of the Great Central Railway (Loughborough) heritage line.
In preparation for the opening of Swithland Reservoir in 1896, the Cropston pumping station was extended to pump water between the three reservoirs.
No sooner was this system in place than Leicester Corporation went to Parliament for powers to extract water from the Derbyshire River Derwent. Other authorities had similar ideas and were obliged to collaborate by forming the Derwent Valley Water Board and building the reservoirs at Howden (1912), Derwent (1916) and Ladybower (1945).
The Leicester legacy of this race to build reservoirs includes three reservoirs and two former pumping stations.
Cropston Pumping Station, built for the Leicester Waterworks Company in 1870 and extended by Leicester Corporation Waterworks in 1894, was stripped of its engines and boilers in the 1950s and has been sensitively converted, retaining what was left of the internal installation, to a restaurant, wedding and conference venue by the current owners, Simon and Liz Thompson in 2015: https://www.thepumpingstation.co.uk.
The bar and restaurant space is in the former boiler house and the adjacent 1894 engine house retains the overhead winch which serviced the machinery below. The 1870 engine house is now a private residence which includes the spiral staircase up the truncated chimney to an observation deck.
Visitors park their cars among the ornamental filter beds, below which is an underground brick reservoir which, in time to come, could become an exciting visitor attraction.
Water supply engineering has the happy advantage of enhancing local amenities. People are resistant to having their land flooded, but the end-result is attractive, from Derbyshire’s spectacular lakeland to the quieter landscape of the Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire.
Swithland Pumping Station is not accessible to the public.
Former Odeon Cinema, Flat Street, Sheffield (1993)
It pleases me to have books on my bookshelf that were written by people I know.
I met Sam Manning at the 2015 Picture House Revival weekend that Hand Of created to relaunch the Abbeydale Picture Palace as a cinema after it had been closed for forty years.
Sam was at the time doing postgraduate research into cinema-going in Sheffield and Belfast between 1945 and 1965, and asked me to contribute an oral-history interview to his PhD thesis.
I’ve never been to Belfast, so that aspect of his writing was new territory for me, but the Sheffield sections relate to my childhood memories and my more recent local-history research.
Sam writes as part of the “new cinema history” movement [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137337016_7], which seeks to place the contemporary experience of going to the pictures in the wider context of social history in the first sixty-five years of the twentieth century.
This extends the ubiquitous nostalgia accounts of the generation that knew or worked in cinemas until the 1960s and the analyses of cinema architecture, the business history of the industry and the endless literature of films and film-makers that have appeared in recent decades.
On the local level, I learned a great deal because Sam has done the legwork of surveying the surviving archives of individual cinemas against city-wide data from local newspapers, government and industry records and oral-history evidence.
He revises the long-held view that suburban cinema-going was killed by the advent of television. There were other significant factors in play – increasing affluence, flight from inner-city slums to new housing estates and the rise of a generation of young people who thought they’d invented “teenage”, the generation commemorated in Cliff Richard’s hit ‘The Young Ones’ (1962).
He also explains a counterintuitive feature of Sheffield’s post-war cinema history, the building on Flat Street of one of the few post-war Odeon cinemas, later followed by a luxurious ABC on Angel Street.
In the 1930s, when three major chains – Odeon, Gaumont and ABC – dominated the national industry, Sheffield’s cinemas were largely owned by local companies. Gaumont British Theatres took over the Regent in 1929, two years after it opened, and in 1931 ABC leased the Hippodrome, a variety theatre dating back to 1907, which they gave up in 1948. Neither invested in the sort of super-cinema that is the villain of the piece in the film The Smallest Show on Earth (1957).
The Odeon chain leased a site at the junction of Flat Street and Norfolk Street in 1933, and after a five-year delay the architects Harry Weedon and W Calder Robson designed a 2,326-seat cinema, four shops and a three-storey office block. Construction began in March 1939 and quickly came to a halt at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The post-war alignment of Sheffield’s proposed inner ring road, later known as Arundel Gate, meant redesigning the Odeon on a smaller footprint.
When building restrictions were removed in 1954 the pre-war steelwork was dismantled and the new cinema, without the intended shops and offices, was built to a completely fresh design by Harry Weedon and Robert Bullivant.
This design featured a 55-foot screen and seated 2,319 – 1,505 in the stalls and 814 in the balcony. Lighting in the auditorium was by three rows of fittings hanging close to the ceiling and from concealed lights in the two decorative panels each side of the proscenium. Sheffield had seen nothing like it before.
The new Odeon opened on July 16th 1956 with the newly-released Kenneth More feature-film Reach for the Sky, attended by the Deputy Lord Mayor, Ald Joseph Curtis, the managing director of the Rank Organisation, John Davis, and his wife, film star Dinah Sheridan, accompanied by the Dagenham Girl Pipers, state trumpeters from the York & Lancaster Regiment and a contingent of service personnel from RAF Norton.
In November 1958 the Odeon was equipped to show Todd-AO wide-screen films with stereophonic sound so that it could specialise in long runs of blockbuster movies.
By the mid-1960s, cinema-going habits had changed radically. The Sound of Music on first release ran from October 3rd 1965 until February 1967. It was immediately followed by Khartoum (1966).
For a short period of slightly less than two years, there were four high-quality 70mm screens in the city. The new ABC had a 60ft screen from its opening on May 18th 1961. The 70ft screen at the Gaumont was first used on July 23rd 1969 and the smaller screen at Gaumont 2 followed in October of the same year.
The Odeon closed on June 5th 1971 at the end of a further fourteen-month run of The Sound of Music and reopened in September of the same year as a Top Rank bingo hall, later rebranded as Mecca.
The Gaumont closed on November 7th 1985, followed by the ABC on July 28th 1988. Both buildings were demolished.
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