Exploring New South Wales: Albury Station

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Railway Station, Albury, New South Wales, Australia

Railway Station, Albury, New South Wales, Australia

There was a time when travelling between New South Wales and Victoria involved going through customs.

When the railway lines first reached the Murray River, from Melbourne to the Victoria border-town of Wodonga in 1873 and from Sydney to the New South Wales side at Albury in 1881, there was no rail bridge:  passengers had to transfer by coach.

Even when the rail bridge was completed in 1883, passengers still had to transfer across the platform because the two railways ran to different gauges:  the Victoria North Eastern Railway was built to the Irish broad gauge of 5ft 3in, while the New South Wales Great Southern Railway had the British standard gauge of 4ft 8½in.

The fine station at Albury, designed by the NSW Government Railways’ Chief Engineer, John Whitton (1820-1899), is distinguished by its 1,480-foot covered island platform which allowed inter-state passengers to transfer between the gauges – an experience which astonished Mark Twain:  “…a singular thing, the oddest thing, the strangest thing, the unaccountable marvel that Australia can show, namely the break of gauge at Albury. Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth.”

Though the Commonwealth of Australia was constituted in 1901, oversight of transport policy remained with the individual states, and it took until 1962 to complete a standard-gauge through connection between Melbourne and Sydney.

This produced the anomaly of a twin-track railway between Melbourne and Albury operating as two single lines, one of each gauge.

The remaining broad-gauge track on this route was converted to standard gauge between 2008 and 2011.

The state boundary at Albury-Wodonga is practical, yet appeared to me invisible:  the adjacent towns are, after all, both part of the Commonwealth of Australia.  A similar conjunction on the border between Canada and the US state of Vermont is more vexatious:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20649024.

 

Another Place

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Antony Gormley's 'Another Place', Crosby Beach, Lancashire

Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’, Crosby Beach, Lancashire

Why is it that local councils want to look a gift horse in the mouth when they’re presented with an opportunity to adopt a tourist attraction of international importance?

Bristol City Council was initially dubious about having the SS Great Britain sitting in the otherwise useless harbour in the 1970s.

Bradford failed to support Jonathan Silver’s attempt to bring the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia collection to the derelict Lister Mill in Manningham.

Sefton Council in Merseyside wasn’t at all keen on Antony Gormley’s haunting collection of cast-iron figures, Another Place, staying very long on Crosby Beach.

Another Place originated in 1997, and Gormley’s figures had previously gazed out to sea in Germany, Norway and Belgium before they were brought to the Mersey estuary as a component of the 4th Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the European Capital of Culture event (2008).

They were intended, when the temporary planning permission for their installation ran out, to be taken to New York, but Sefton Council relented and they are now to remain.

They’re by no means universally popular.  They’re considered a hazard to watersports.  Wildlife authorities worry about the effect of visitors on feeding birds, though biologists study with interest the colonisation of the figures by barnacles.

Some people regard them as pornographic, because each has a “simplified” penis.  Whether the objection is to the penis or the simplification is unclear.

The plethora of brown tourist signs directing motorists to Another Place is stark evidence that this mysterious installation has put Sefton on the map.

When all’s said and done, why else would people traipse down to Burbo Bank, but to gaze on Gormley’s iron men?

Nicholas Wroe’s 2005 profile of Antony Gormley is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/jun/25/art.

 

Watts Warehouse

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Former Watts Warehouse, now Britannia Hotel, Manchester

Former Watts Warehouse, now Britannia Hotel, Manchester

In the Manchester cotton trade, a warehouse was not so much a back-end storage facility as a front-end sales facility.

The Manchester merchants displayed their wares in extensive, prestigious premises, with floor after floor of merchandise available to view.

Orders were dispatched and packed through the basement and delivered by road cart, rail and canal.

One of the most endearing surviving examples is the great palazzo of Samuel & James Watts on Portland Street on Portland Street.

James Watts was the socially ambitious owner of Abney Hall, Cheshire, where he hosted Prince Albert for the opening of the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition.  His firm’s prosperity was founded on wholesale drapery, and it was said that at one time the Warehouse had £10,000-worth of ribbons in one room.

Designed by the architectural partnership of Travis & Magnall from 1851 and eventually opened on March 16th 1858, its successive storeys are in Egyptian, Italian Renaissance, sixteenth-century Dutch, Elizabethan, French Renaissance, Flemish and Gothic styles.

Construction dates are uncertain, but it is likely that work started early in 1855 and was largely complete by the end of 1856.  It was said to have cost £100,000.

Modern visitors take some convincing that this was in fact a warehouse.

After ten years under threat of demolition, the Grade II*-listed Watts Warehouse became the opulently decorated Britannia Hotel, opened in 1982 [http://www.britanniahotels.com/hotels/manchester].  Many of its internal spaces are divided and its ceilings lowered, but the building is intact and in use.

If you pass it, take a look at the magnificent staircase, original to the building and intended to impress the clients who came to do business.

For background information on Watts and other Manchester warehouses, see http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/history/victorian/Victorian3.html.

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

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

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Plaza for sale

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Plaza Cinema, Handsworth, Sheffield (1984)

Plaza Cinema, Handsworth, Sheffield (1984)

Former cinemas are selling like hotcakes in Sheffield at the moment.  Recent articles have featured the Adelphi, Attercliffe and the Abbeydale.

The Plaza Cinema, Handsworth, which has for years now been Rileys ten-pin bowling and snooker hall, is up for auction with a guide-price of £95,000+:  http://www.markjenkinson.co.uk/auctions/tuesday-19th-march-2013/display/Rileys%20Snooker%20Hall,%201%20Richmond%20Road,%20Handsworth,%20Sheffield%20-%7C-967#lot.

Designed by a local architect, Bernard Powell of Woodhouse, who was until 1921 the Handsworth Urban District Council surveyor, the Plaza shared characteristics with the recently demolished Ritz, Parson Cross – an unspectacular exterior hiding a thoroughly modern Art Deco interior.  Bernard Powell provided a squat tower which originally carried the name ‘Plaza’ in neon, visible across the neighbourhood.

The only time I’ve visited the Plaza, when it was a bingo club in the 1980s, the foyer was virtually intact, an imitation Odeon-style essay in fins and wavy plasterwork.

The auditorium had been divided at balcony level, and was difficult to visualise.  The Cinema Treasures website [http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/25976] describes a colour-scheme that could have been awful but might have been elegant – orange merging to light buff with a royal-blue dado.

The Plaza isn’t listed, so it’s under the radar of conservation groups.  It’s likely that if the modern interior fittings were stripped back the original space would be revealed.  Whether that’s an asset for redevelopment depends on the vision and the intentions of the new owner.

It would be no surprise if the place was bulldozed.  But it might yet turn out to be a building worth keeping.

Island of Tears

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Ellis Island ferry-boat, New York City (1981)

Ellis Island ferry-boat, New York City (1981)

When I first visited New York City in 1981 my host, my school contemporary Malcolm, insisted there were two places I must visit – the Cloisters and Ellis Island.

Ellis Island was the major immigration reception station for the United States, handling 90% of arrivals from the Old World, from whom 40% of the present-day population are descended, between 1892 and 1954. 

Here the “tired…huddled masses” first set foot in the New World, and the stringent examinations they underwent determined whether they would be allowed to remain.

The “island of tears”, out in the bleak expanse of New York Harbour, has a powerful emotional pull on American consciousness.

When I first visited Ellis Island the facilities were much as they’d been left after the station finally closed on November 29th 1954.  The minimal security team had had little success in preventing pilfering on the otherwise deserted island.  Water in the central-heating system froze during the winter, and the buildings deteriorated inexorably as the vegetation took over the grounds.  The ferry Ellis Island was left at its moorings, where ultimately it sank.

Since then, Ellis Island has been transformed into an immaculate museum by the National Parks Authority, commemorating the contribution that immigrants have made to American life.  Inevitably, it has lost the patina of decay which badly needed arresting.  I’m glad I saw it in its unrestored state:  it was a powerfully evocative place back then.

The modern visitor can still see the baggage-handling facilities, the scene of much overcrowding and of notorious “losses” of immigrants’ possessions, the staircase which formed part of the “six-second medical”, in which signs of undue exertion were regarded as diagnostic evidence, and the great Registry Room, in which inspectors had to decide, by interview using interpreters in any of up to thirty languages apart from English, whether an immigrant was “clearly and beyond a doubt” eligible to land.

The history of European colonisation is a complex and controversial aspect of international history.  Malcolm was right in urging me to fit in one of the building blocks of my understanding of the USA by visiting Ellis Island while I was in New York.

Admission to Ellis Island is free, but it is – obviously – only accessible by boat.  The public ferry from the southern tip of Manhattan is bookable at http://www.statuecruises.com.  Details of the facilities on the island are at the voluminous website http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/ellis_island.asp.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

 

Terra-cotta city: Ikon Gallery

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Former Oozells Street School, now the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Former Oozells Street School, now the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery [http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/about/introduction] in the middle of Brindleyplace was formerly the Oozells Street School (Martin & Chamberlain 1877), one of the forty-one designs for the Birmingham School Board produced by Martin & Chamberlain between 1873 and 1898, in this case built to three storeys to make best use of a cramped site.

From 1906 it was the Pupil Teachers’ Centre for Girls, later the Commercial College Day Department and latterly the College of Food and Domestic Arts until 1967.

After years of neglect in the blighted Broad Street area, it was redeveloped for gallery use and its saddle-back ventilation tower rebuilt by Levitt Bernstein Associates (1997).

It’s a superb conversion, for the most part using the original classroom spaces, with modern access needs, including a glass-sided lift, carefully inserted.

Its excellent Café Ikon [http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/about/visiting/cafe_opus] is open to visitors without entering the gallery itself, and is a particularly pleasant place to sit on warm days.  It’s a good idea to beware of the teapots, though:  they’re good to look at but come adrift in the act of pouring.

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

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

Flxible Clipper

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Ansett Roadways Flxible Clipper, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

Ansett Roadways Flxible Clipper, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

I was walking along a street in Launceston, Tasmania, when I came across this strange beast of a bus.

When I got home my friend Doug, who likes buses, helped me to track its provenance.

It’s a Flxible Clipper, an American design dating from 1937 that was imported to Australia in 1947 by Sir Reginald Ansett (1909-1981).

Reg Ansett was an inspired Australian entrepreneur:  he began running buses and taxis between the towns of western Victoria, and then founded Ansett Airways in 1936.  His airline became the basis for investment in hotels and television as well as interests in Diners’ Club and Bic pens.

This particular vehicle is the American original, from which Reg Ansett built a further 105 (or 131, depending on the source,) under licence.  It now belongs to Ken Turnbull, who drove it in the 1950s, bought it in 1974 and restored it to original condition.

There are at least another sixteen Flxible Clippers on the road in Australia, but all the others are converted into motor homes:  http://www.commercialmotor.com/big-lorry-blog/the-fabulous-flxible-clippera.

They are revered for their durability and speed and their inimitable style.  In the USA they were known as “the DC3 of highway buses”:  http://flxibleowners.org/breeds-of-flxibles.

A 1951 Australian model figures in this clip:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw9BYu6BqJo.

Flxible, by the way, is pronounced “Flexible”:  the vowel was dropped for trade-mark purposes in 1919.

 

Exploring Tasmania: Launceston

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St John's Anglican Church, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

St John’s Anglican Church, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

My only chance to see the scale of Tasmania was a bus-journey from Hobart north to Launceston (pronounced Laun-ces-ton with three syllables) – an enjoyable journey following by road an entirely serviceable railway track that hasn’t seen a passenger train since 1978.

My curiosity was aroused by odd places I’d have stopped at if I’d been in a car – Oatlands, its early-nineteenth-century sandstone buildings constructed by convicts, Callington Mill (1837) the only functioning Lincolnshire windmill in the southern hemisphere [http://www.callingtonmill.com.au/mill], Perth, which has a dignified octagonal Baptist church and a rather sad locomotive “plinthed”, as the website describes it, in a park:  http://www.australiansteam.com/H6.htm.

The Launceston Decorative & Fine Arts Society booked me into the splendidly named Clarion City Park Grand Hotel [http://www.clarionhotel.com/hotel-launceston-australia-AU738] and made sure I didn’t starve:  I like to sample southern-hemisphere fish, so at lunch I ordered gummy and potato salad at Silt @ Seaport [now apparently closed – http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g255344-d1652423-Reviews-Silt_Seaport-Launceston_Tasmania.html] and after the lecture I was taken for dinner at a carnivore’s nirvana, the Black Cow Bistro:  http://blackcowbistro.com.au.

I liked Launceston, where I had a free morning before flying back to Sydney.  The shopping streets are particularly rich in Art Deco buildings.  My particular favourite building, however, was St John’s Anglican Church, a weird pot-pourri of different building phases – a “Regency Gothic” tower dating back to 1830, the chancel and transepts added according to an unfinished plan by the Huddersfield-born architect Alexander North (1848-1945) between 1901 and 1911, with the nave enlarged, again by Alexander North, in 1937-8.  North’s splendid crossing is spanned by a concrete dome, but the massive central tower remains unbuilt.

At the time I visited St John’s I didn’t realise – there’s no reason why I should – that the organ was first installed by Charles Brindley, organ-builder of my native Sheffield, in 1861:  http://www.ohta.org.au/organs/organs/LauncestonStJohns.html.   It seems that Brindley, together with his eventual business-partner, Albert Healey Foster, exported organs to the southern hemisphere on a regular basis.

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.

 

Exploring Tasmania: Hobart

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St George's Church, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

St George’s Church, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

My only visit to Tasmania so far was a whistle-stop affair.  The lecture-tour itinerary I was following meant that I flew into Hobart on Sunday night, lectured there on Monday night, travelled to Launceston on Tuesday to lecture, and left for Sydney on Wednesday morning.

Van Diemen’s Land was a bad place to be in the early nineteenth century.  British criminals feared it;  colonial administrators hated it, and the settlers’ activities ultimately exterminated the indigenous population.

It is a beautiful island, and a place to which I must return.

I stayed at Battery Point, on the hill above Sullivans Cove, at the comfortable Battery Point Boutique Accommodation [http://www.batterypointaccommodation.com.au/aboutus/index.htm], and my hosts, Jill and Bill Bale, made sure I saw as much of their city as possible in a short time.

Battery Point and the harbour-front below it, Salamanca Place, reminded me strongly of Whitby, which is plausible because Hobart dates from 1804 and its oldest streets are more Georgian than Victorian.

In the limited time available I needed to check out Hobart’s cathedrals for my ‘Antipodean Gothic’ lecture and publication. 

I’m glad that Bill, my host, insisted on pointing me towards St George’s Parish Church, a superb Greek-revival building of 1836-8, designed by the Irish-born Civil Engineer & Colonial Architect John Lee Archer (1791-1852).  The particularly elegant tower (1840s, based on the Tower of the Winds, Athens) and the imposing Doric porch (1888) were added by the convict-architect James Blackburn (1803-1854), who had been transported for forgery and who at the end of his life designed the first water-supply system for Melbourne.

St Mary’s Cathedral, seat of the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart, is Gothic, imperfectly constructed 1860-6 and re-erected 1876-81.  It has a memorial stained-glass window by John Hardman & Co and a statue of the Virgin and Child, designed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and carved by George Myers.  Three modern stained-glass windows are by the Hungarian-born designer Stephen Moor (1915-2003).  In contrast, the font – of unknown provenance – is thought to be Norman.

St David’s Cathedral, the centre of the Anglican diocese of Tasmania, is an early design of the late-Victorian English architect, George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907).  It replaced an earlier classical parish church of 1823.  St David’s Cathedral was begun in 1868 and the nave was consecrated in 1874.  It took until 1936 to complete:  the chancel, consecrated in 1894, proved unsafe and had to be reconstructed in 1908-9;  the tower, for which the foundation-stone had been laid in 1892, was eventually constructed 1931-6.

I keep finding similar stories in the origins of Australian cities – diligent, determined congregations building churches, designed either by people on the spot who’ve brought their skills across the seas, or by British architects sending out plans that they knew they’d never see built.

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.

 

 

Nobbut an annexe

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Opera House, Winter Gardens, Blackpool, Lancashire

Opera House, Winter Gardens, Blackpool, Lancashire

Blackpool’s Opera House is the third on its site – a lavish art-deco design by Charles MacKeith, with two balconies and a total seating-capacity of 2,920.  The full stage-width is 110 feet, with a proscenium opening of 45 feet.

The opening-ceremony on July 14th 1939 was performed by Jessie Matthews, who was appearing in I can take it at the Grand Theatre just down the road, with an organ-recital including a duet by Horace Finch, the Winter Gardens’ resident organist, and Reginald Dixon.

The stage show included a train-wreck scene incorporating a full-size replica of the Royal Scot locomotive.

The first variety bill at the reopened Opera House starred George Formby Jnr (who was paid £1,000 a week) in a review entitled Turned out nice again.

The Opera House was the venue for the first Royal Variety Performance to take place outside London, in April 1955.

When Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II remarked what a fine building the Opera House was, the company chairman Douglas Bickerstaffe commented, “Ay, I suppose so, although it’s nobbut an annexe to t’Tower.”

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

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.