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Former Head Post Office, Fitzalan Square, Sheffield (1993)

Former Head Post Office, Fitzalan Square, Sheffield (1993)

Sheffield was a town that thought it was a village, until 1893, when it became a city that thought it was a town.

Indeed, the first impressive piece of civic planning in the centre of Sheffield was Fitzalan Square, which grew from street clearance in the 1880s and is dominated by the baroque bulk of the former Post Office, built in 1910 to the designs of the Office of Works architect, Walter Pott.

This imposing place in which to buy a stamp closed in 1999, and three successive developers have failed to find a way of financing a new use:  http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/sorted_at_last_1_3672707.

Meanwhile, the urban explorers have kept an eye on the place, and their posts show that while most of the interiors were functional, the public spaces and the main staircase deserved to be kept:  http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=5062,  http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/other-sites/68834-sheffield-central-post-office-february-12-a.html and http://www.urbexforums.com/showthread.php/16186-General-Post-office-amp-sorting-office-Fitzalan-Square-Sheffield-Feb-2012.

The latest word is that this fine but mouldering building is to become a college for overseas students with 18-storey residential tower on the vacant plot behind:  http://www.sheffieldnewsandsport.com/2013/03/21/fitzalan-square-facelift.

If another high-rise building in the city-centre is the price of keeping Pott’s Edwardian splendour I think it’s worth paying.

Meanwhile, within a couple of minutes’ walk of Fitzalan Square, the Old Town Hall and the United Gas Light Company Offices, both listed, stand idle and neglected, and two fine post-war department stores, the former Walsh’s and the Co-op’s Castle House are in an uneasy state of transition.

And the City Planning Committee and the Secretary of State have waved through the demolition of the Edwardian wing of Jessop’s Hospital – which is another story…

 

Caledonia rides again

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Isle of Man Railway, Port Erin Station: loco no 15 (as Manx Northern Railway no 4): Caledonia

Isle of Man Railway, Port Erin Station: loco no 15 (as Manx Northern Railway no 4): Caledonia

Photo:  John Binns

The Isle of Man Railway has more locomotives than it really needs, and to the untutored eye they look very much similar.  In fact, there are three different varieties, and each of the survivors has its idiosyncrasies.

Only four of the eighteen original locos have completely disappeared:  of the remainder, a couple haven’t moved for decades and others are in private ownership.  One of the original 1873 fleet, No 3, Pender, is sectioned and exhibited at the Manchester Museum of Science & Industry.

Enthusiasts look forward to new events on this great little railway.  The 2013 star turn is the rebuilt No 15, Caledonia, one of two locomotives surviving from the Manx Northern Railway, which ran from St John’s to Ramsey and was originally independent of the Isle of Man Railway.

Since the Manx steam railway was nationalised in 1977, its locomotives have worn a variety of liveries in order, according to rumour, to prove that there are more than two locos in the fleet.

Caledonia is turned out in the attractive Manx Northern livery of “Metropolitan Carriage red”, a darker shade than the standard IMR red.

Built in 1885 to work the steeply graded Foxdale Railway, serving the zinc mines in the heart of the island, Caledonia was required to work a ruling gradient of 1 in 49, but proved capable of climbing at 1 in 12 when she visited the Snaefell Mountain Railway in 1995.

Over 125 years old, the second newest loco in the fleet – Caledonia proves that Victorian steam locomotives were built to last.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The People’s Caterer

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Empress Ballroom, Winter Gardens, Blackpool, Lancashire

Empress Ballroom, Winter Gardens, Blackpool, Lancashire

The great rival of Thomas Sergenson, Blackpool’s late-Victorian theatre impresario, was William Holland (1837-1895), “the People’s Caterer”, who first made his name managing the Canterbury Music Hall, Lambeth [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Music_Hall].

Bill Holland was employed by the Winter Gardens Company specifically to counter the competition from Sergenson.

Against the opposition of a number of Winter Gardens directors, including the chairman, Dr Cocker, Bill Holland proposed and carried through the construction of the predecessor of the present-day Opera House, designed by Frank Matcham and built in nine months flat at a cost of £9,098.  It opened with a D’Oyly Carte production, The Yeomen of the Guard, on June 10th 1889.

As part of the same project, Frank Matcham redesigned the Winter Gardens Pavilion in the form of a proscenium-arched theatre.

Holland promoted an all-day admission charge of 6d which included operatic ballet spectaculars directed by John Tiller.  Fixed budget catering also appealed to thrifty Blackpool holidaymakers:  “One Shilling Dinner and One Shilling Tea.  Plenty of Everything.  Help Yourself!” 

Bill Holland apparently owned an old grey parrot, which he had trained to say “Going to see Bill Holland’s ballet?”  For the Winter Gardens, he initiated The Great Parrot Scheme:  he bought a hundred parrots, each in a cage marked “Blackpool Winter Gardens – Two Shows Daily”.

The birds were lined up in rows four deep and trained to repeat the grey parrot’s message and were allegedly placed all the leading hotels and restaurants of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

The total investment in the Opera House and associated extensions cost the Winter Gardens Company approximately £14,000:  gross receipts trebled between 1887 and 1891 to £36,000 and the dividend reached 8%.

In response to the opening of the Tower in 1893, Bill Holland persuaded the directors to install electric lighting throughout the Winter Gardens at a cost of £3,307, and to pay an additional £975 to buy out Dr Cocker’s 1875 covenant against dancing, so that he could plan the Empress Ballroom, designed by Mangnall & Littlewood of Manchester (who shortly afterwards built Morecambe’s Victoria Pavilion), with a barrel-vault roof, a balcony promenade and a proscenium stage. 

The Empress Ballroom was at the time one of the largest in the world, 189ft × 110ft, with a dancing-area of 12,500 square feet.

The Art Nouveau decorative scheme included plasterwork by J M Boekbinder and twenty-eight Doulton tile panels of female figures symbolising jewels by William J Neatby.

It opened in 1896, the year after Bill Holland’s death.

The Tower Company paid him a posthumous compliment by refurbishing their somewhat functional Assembly Hall as the sumptuous Tower Ballroom.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  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.

Exploring New South Wales: St Paul’s Church, Cobbitty

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St Paul's Church, Cobbitty, New South Wales, Australia

St Paul’s Church, Cobbitty, New South Wales, Australia

When I lectured to the Camden Decorative & Fine Arts Society, on the south-western outskirts of Sydney, my hostess Nola Tegel insisted on taking me to one of the oldest intact churches in Australia, St Paul’s Church, Cobbitty, which otherwise I might never have found.

Cobbitty was developed around the pioneer ranch of Rowland and Elizabeth Hassall, missionaries who arrived in Australia in 1798.  Their son, Rev Thomas Hassall (1794-1868), founded the first Sunday School in Australia when he was nineteen years old, was the first Australian-born Anglican priest and became the first rector of Cobbitty in 1827.

He built the Heber Chapel, a simple stone schoolroom dedicated in 1829 to the memory of the much-travelled Rt Rev Reginald Heber (1783-1826), who was Bishop of Calcutta at the time when the whole of Australia was one of its archdeaconries.

Known as the “galloping parson”, Thomas Hassall farmed sheep and acted as magistrate while serving a huge parish:  http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hassall-thomas-2167.

The later church, a simple Gothic building with a spire, was designed by John Verge (1782-1861), the English-born architect who is best-known for a series of fine villas in the Sydney suburbs, and was at least partly responsible for Elizabeth Bay House (1835-9).

St Paul’s Church was completed in 1842.  In the churchyard is the grave of Edward Wise, aged 21, who was struck by lightning while building the steeple.

Recent renovations have revealed, so I’m told, that the unusual shape, with a vestigial sanctuary and broad transepts, results from a decision during construction to extend and reorientate the church.

The church has one of the very few surviving organs by William Davidson (1876):  http://www.sydneyorgan.com/Cobbity.html.

Thomas Hassall is buried at Cobbitty, and his family are still linked to the parish:  the grandson of his great-great-nephew was christened there in 2011:  http://macarthur-chronicle-camden.whereilive.com.au/news/story/path-of-restoration-for-cobbitty-church.

Brits used to be sniffy about the lack of history in the former outposts of Empire.  In fact, Cobbity has all the history you’d expect in a traditional English village – buildings going back to the roots of the settlement, fascinating characters, archaeology, and family links back to the Australian equivalent of the Norman Conquest:  http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/cobbitty.

Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Gothic Down Under:  English architecture in the Antipodes explores the influence of British architects, and British-trained architects, on the design of churches and other buildings in the emerging communities of Australia and New Zealand.  For details, please click here.

 

Kedleston Bath House

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Kedleston Bath House, Derbyshire

Kedleston Bath House, Derbyshire

My Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & Hydros guests who didn’t think much of Quarndon Spa didn’t have the chance to see its upmarket neighbour, the Kedleston Bath House, because it’s in the middle of a golf course.

For clients who might scorn the “wretched lodging and entertainment” in the village of Quarndon, Sir Nathaniel Curzon of Kedleston Hall built the New Inn, now the Kedleston Inn (1761), on the stretch of new turnpike road that enabled him to extend his parkland.

As part of this development Sir Nathaniel built the classical bath house, designed by Jason Harris (Matthew Brettingham’s assistant), over a sulphur spring in Kedleston Park, about half a mile from the Quarndon Spa, with segregated baths and changing rooms divided by a central hall and entered through a recessed portico.  The baths themselves were originally overlooked by a statue of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine.

The Kedleston spring had been recognised by 1730, when Thomas Cox described it as “singular in curing old ulcers and especially the leprosy”.  James Pilkington, in A View of the Present State of Derbyshire… (1789), remarked –

Persons of a weak and relaxed habit have been much benefited by the use of this water.  After drinking it a few days they have found their spirits and strength return in a surprising manner, and in the space of a month a cure has been entirely effected.

By visiting the two nearby springs, visitors had a choice of drinking chalybeate (iron-bearing) or sulphurous waters according to their perceived needs.  Neither sounds a lot of fun.

The bath house, reduced to half its original depth in a 1925 restoration, is particularly difficult to see.  Access to the actual building requires permission (and the key) from the National Trust office at Kedleston Hall.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Derbyshire-based Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. 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.

Quarndon Spa

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Spa House, Quarndon, Derbyshire

Spa House, Quarndon, Derbyshire

When I took the tour-group on the Derbyshire Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros programme on a whistle-stop tour of the lesser spas of the county, I’d no idea what their expectations might be when we reached Quarndon Spa.

One or two people were a little disappointed with what looks like a Gothic bus-shelter.

In fact, its inconsiderable size is what makes it interesting.  In the days before science gave us ample solutions to many maladies, those who could afford it (or gain charity) would travel long distances and put up with privations in the hope that the mineral qualities of a particular spring would bring relief.

The little chalybeate (iron-bearing) spa at Quarndon was recommended as early as 1663 as “good against vomiting, comforts ye stomach, cures ye ulcers of ye bladder, stopps all fluxes, helps conception, stays bleeding in ye breast and at ye srige”.  (I’ve no idea what “srige” is, but it’s not a typo.)

Daniel Defoe visited in 1727:  “We found the wells, as custom bids us call them, pretty full of company, the waters good, and very physical, but wretched lodging and entertainment.”

The adjacent pub, the Joiner’s Arms, is first recorded in 1702, and was run by one family for nearly three hundred years to 1928.  The last survivor of that family was Miss Helen Hampshire, who died on July 16th 1972, aged 102.

Quarndon lost out in the nineteenth century to nearby Matlock Bath, and to Buxton in the north of the county, because its waters were cold and no railway came near it.

The spring disappeared as a result of successive earthquakes in 1863, 1895, 1903 and 1956, but the pub is still serving customers [Home | The Joiners Arms (theja.co.uk)] and the little spa house is maintained by the parish council.

You could easily drive past it without even noticing, yet its history has much to say.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Derbyshire-based Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. 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.

Well well

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Bath Houses, Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire

Bath Houses, Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire

When I put together the Derbyshire Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros tour, I made a point of including some of the obscure, rarely noticed relics of the ancient custom of using natural springs for therapeutic purposes.

The village of Stoney Middleton has twin bath houses, hidden behind the parish church.

They were built by the local landowner, Thomas Denman, in 1815.  Before that, according to James Pilkington, in his A View of the Present State of Derbyshire (1789) the baths were open to the elements and “discouraging”.

Denman provided male and female baths and changing rooms, complete with fireplaces.

That must have counted as luxurious in the wilds of Derbyshire in the time of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.

Nowadays they are used for an associated purpose:  restored in 1985-92 by the parish council, they provide storage for the village’s well-dressing team.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Derbyshire-based Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  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.

Falcon Lift

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Falcon Lift, Douglas, Isle of Man

Falcon Lift, Douglas, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is an astonishing repository of archaic technology that has survived against the odds.

Only now, after fifty years of neglect, is the Cunningham’s Camp Escalator being dismantled as dangerous.  I trust that the admirable Manx Museum will rescue as much of its parts as possible to restore as a static exhibit sometime in the future.

Another relic lingers on Douglas seafront, high up on the cliffs.

The Falcon Lift was constructed in 1927 by William Wadsworth & Co of Bolton to connect a hotel and dance pavilion with the promenade:  http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/towns/douglas/fcliff.htm.

It was the second lift on the site:  an earlier funicular on a different alignment, built in 1877, had been transported to Port Soderick at the far end of the Marine Drive in 1898.

The existing Falcon Lift isn’t a funicular with two balancing cars.  It’s simply a lift, and it’s been sitting at the top of its track since the hotel closed in 1990:  http://www.hows.org.uk/personal/rail/iom.htm.

It’s simply not possible to preserve everything that might be interesting, but for the moment the Falcon Lift remains, like much else on the Isle of Man, because no-one has seen the need to get rid of it.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Back-to-Backs

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Back-to-Backs, Birmingham

Back-to-Backs, Birmingham

Though the National Trust is strongly associated with preserving the lifestyles of grand houses, one of its finest restoration projects of recent years brings vividly to life the living conditions of very ordinary Birmingham workers and their families.

The Birmingham Back-to-Backs is a fortunate survival of early nineteenth-century terraced houses dating from 1802-31 on the edge of the city centre, south of New Street Station, on the fringes of Chinatown and the Gay Village.

Here in what was once Court 15 on the corner of Ince Street and Hurst Street, as many of sixty people lived in eleven cramped houses, almost all of them back-to-back or blind-back in layout, with the privies and wash-houses (which in Birmingham are called “brewhouses”) in the yard outside.

Four of the houses are recreated to illustrate specific periods – a watchmaker’s house of the 1840s, a glass-eye-maker’s house of the 1870s, a locksmith’s of the 1930s and (after the buildings had been declared unfit for human habitation) a tailor’s shop of the 1970s which eventually closed when its proprietor, George Saunders, retired in 2002.

There were 43,000 of these dwellings in Birmingham at the end of the First World War, housing 200,000 people.  By 1988, when Court 15 was listed Grade II, it was the only survivor.

After detailed archaeological and historical research and sensitive stabilisation and restoration by the Birmingham Conservation Trust, the Back-to-Backs were handed over to the National Trust.

The Trust has recreated the 1930s sweet shop on the corner, operates three of the houses as short-term rental properties, and opens most of the remaining buildings to the public on strictly timed-ticketed tours.

Here is a living memorial to the cramped, arduous but sociable lives of the millions of Britons and foreign immigrants who poured into the Victorian cities looking for work, and who are the ancestors of most of the current British population.

The Birmingham Back to Backs is not the easiest National Trust property to arrange to visit.  Details are at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/birmingham-back-to-backs.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Home from home

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Alton Castle, Staffordshire

Alton Castle, Staffordshire

Photo:  Maureen Mannion

When you drive down the hill from the entrance to Alton Towers, into the steep valley of the River Churnet, you see on the opposite cliff the gaunt outline of Alton Castle, built by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin for Charles, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury.

Quite why Lord Shrewsbury wanted a Bavarian-style mock castle on top of the twelfth- and fifteenth-century remains of the original Alton Castle is unclear.

He might have wanted a more compact retreat from the extravagant splendours of Alton Towers.  He could have intended it as a dower house for his mother.

He was a major patron of the Catholic Church, a great deal more pious than his predecessor, and the unfinished castle includes a spectacularly tall, narrow, unexpectedly tiny private chapel.

Lord Shrewsbury also had Pugin design a chapel, schoolroom and almshouses for “decayed priests”, which became known as Alton Hospital (in the original sense of a home, rather than a medical facility).

The Earl rarely constrained the great architect’s genius with a budget, and the result – though not fully complete – is an exquisite complex of Victorian Gothic buildings by the greatest architect of the day, working for one of the most generous patrons.

Alton Castle was used by the Sisters of Mercy for a prep school from 1919 to 1989.  It stood empty until 1996 when the Archdiocese of Birmingham put it to good use as a retreat centre run for, and largely by, young people:  http://www.altoncastle.co.uk.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Pugin and the Gothic Revival’ tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.