My dad’s lost opportunity

I’ve known for a long time that my dad missed a lifetime opportunity in 1926 at the age of twelve when he was awarded a scholarship to King Edward VII Grammar School, which had a reputation as the best place in Sheffield to gain an education.

King Ted’s, as people called it (and still do), was at the time a fee-paying school where there were social expectations alongside academic opportunities.

My dad’s parents felt compelled to turn the scholarship down because they simply couldn’t afford the incidentals such as uniform and fares and needed their sons and daughters to start work at the then school-leaving age of fourteen.

In addition, it was the year of the General Strike and they had five children, with a sixth on the way, and there was no telling which of them might pass scholarships in future. My granddad was a boilerman in the coke ovens at Tinsley Park, so their finances were precarious.

All this was simply family history of purely personal interest until I came across an obituary for Bill Moore (1911-2008), a celebrated figure in left-wing politics in Yorkshire and beyond, who was said to be the first Attercliffe boy to win a free scholarship to grammar school: https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/19/bill-moore.

This set me thinking. King Edward’s was founded in 1905. If it took seventeen years for a lad from any of the numerous elementary schools in the Lower Don Valley to gain a free grammar-school education, perhaps my dad might have been the second.

I checked the Education Committee minutes and without looking further back than 1920 I discovered that Bill Moore was by no means the first Attercliffe lad to go to King Ted’s. Between eleven and twenty scholarships were awarded each year from 1920 to 1926, mostly to pupils from schools on the prosperous west side of the city.

In 1921 William Wild, aged 12 years 3 months, left my alma mater, Huntsman’s Gardens Council School, for King Edward’s on a Close Entrance Scholarship. His father was a brass foundry manager, so could no doubt afford the tram fare, yet the family lived on Brinsworth Street, two minutes’ walk from Huntsman’s Gardens, in the very heart of the industrial East End – by no means a leafy affluent suburb.

By the time Bill Moore was eligible in the summer of 1923 the system had changed and under his birth name, Enos Leslie Moore, he was awarded a Free Scholarship, “tenable for the period of school life and covering free tuition, the provision of all school amenities and the use, but not the gift, of books” along with a maintenance grant.

He stayed at King Edward’s until 1930 when he won a further scholarship to study history at Oriel College, Oxford. In 1935, after graduation he joined the Communist Party and engaged in left-wing politics for the rest of his long life.

Bill Moore’s story gives me a perspective of the magnitude of my dad’s loss, and explains why he and my mother were so keen for me to have the opportunity that had been denied them.

For that I have always been profoundly grateful.

Reclaiming a wasting asset

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Queen’s Pier, Ramsey, Isle of Man (2023)

Photo: © John Binns

When I wrote a blog-article about Queen’s Pier, Ramsey in the Isle of Man in 2011 there was little to suggest that it wouldn’t continue to decay, as it had done for twenty years, yet despite many delays and the tribulations of the pandemic, effective plans are at last in place to restore the Isle of Man’s largest surviving engineering structure.

The island is rich in industrial and transport archaeology because the Manx habitually leave redundant structures standing unless there’s a need or an economic reason to destroy them.

That’s why the island still retains steam and electric railways, a horse tramway, the Great Laxey Wheel and much else in situ and in use.

The flip-side of this conservatism is that the wheels grind slowly when decay becomes dangerous and restoration is urgent.

The last Steam Packet ship departed from Ramsey in 1970; the disused landing stage became unsafe and was closed in 1979; the little pier tramway closed in 1981.

In 1991, after the café at the pier head was burnt down, rebuilt and twice vandalised, the Manx Department of Highways, Ports & Properties closed the entire structure permanently and commissioned a survey which concluded that demolition would cost over £1 million and a full restoration £2.5 million.

The Manx government, Tynwald, continued to provide £40,000 a year for minimal safety maintenance, and a Friends of Ramsey Queen’s Pier group was formed in 1994, initially with the comedian Norman Wisdom, a Manx resident, as president. The following year the pier was added to the Manx list of protected buildings to safeguard its future.

Discussions about restoration proceeded at a glacial pace, until in 2011 Tynwald allocated £1.8 million to stabilise the structure.

This led to a fresh report which planned a sequenced restoration in seven phases, each of them costing £1.2-1.7 million, overseen by the Queen’s Pier Restoration Trust (QPRT), which in 2016 began work on the fifty metres nearest the promenade.

The first three bays (of a total of sixty) were reopened to the public in 2021, with the return of the tramway’s locomotive and carriage from the Jurby Transport Museum.

The current phase involves restoration of Bays 4-8, of which the first three bays are close to completion.

This steady, methodical process of fundraising and practical work is an admirable exercise in co-operation between volunteers and the Government, which will clearly take a decade or two before the public can, in the words of the historian Richard Crowhurst, “stroll along these decks once again taking in the sea air, and partake of a cup of tea and a sandwich at the end”.

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.

Try-out for St Paul’s

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St Stephen Walbrook Church, City of London

Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was a miraculous human being.

If central London were obliterated by a sudden disaster nowadays, it’s unlikely that its restoration would be entrusted to a professor of astronomy, but after the Great Fire in 1666 it was the obvious solution. At that time the best professionals to employ in construction were academics who understood the physics of making buildings stand up.

King Charles II had already consulted Wren, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, over several projects, including a much-needed restoration of the medieval St Paul’s Cathedral, when two-thirds of the City was burnt down in five days beginning in the early hours of September 2nd 1666. Wren surveyed the wreckage, mapped out a comprehensive, radical plan to rebuild and laid it before the King on September 11th. This adventurous scheme was scuppered because it necessitated wholesale revision of property boundaries.

Nevertheless, Wren – then in his mid-thirties – spent the rest of his long life embellishing London with replacements for the many destroyed parish churches and constructing his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral.

One of these parish churches is distinctive as what Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as “a try-out for St Paul’s”.

The site of the medieval St Stephen’s Walbrook was hemmed in on three sides by other buildings and the street, which takes its name from the now-hidden river that runs south into the Thames. On part of this footprint Wren laid out his biggest London parish church to a largely symmetrical plan and graced it with a top-lit dome.

Pevsner describes in intricate detail the tension Wren contrived between the visitor’s perception of a longitudinal rectangular interior and the overarching centrality of the dome and its supporting columns [Simon Bradley & Nikolaus Pevsner,The Buildings of England: London 1: The City of London (Yale University Press 2002), pp 260-261].

It’s a breathtaking space which, despite repeated restorations, retains the integrity of Wren’s intentions in all respects but one.

In 1987 the churchwarden, Peter Palumbo (b 1935), supervised a much-needed refurbishment and reordered the layout, reducing the linearity that Wren intended and emphasising the space beneath the dome.

Lord Palumbo (as he became in 1991) had commissioned the sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) to design a white polished stone altar that sits directly beneath the dome. It gives priest and people the more direct intimacy that suits present-day worship, and contributes to the lively ministry of a London church, which has few if any resident parishioners, literally next door to the Mansion House.

I saw a well-attended weekday lunchtime Choral Eucharist sung by a youthful choir of organ scholars accompanied by the demure playing of a young lady organist. The place clearly serves the needs of a community of city workers seeking a calming interlude in their working day. I wish I could have caught the monthly Rush Hour Jazz.

There’s a lot going on at St Stephen Walbrook: St Stephen Walbrook London – a place of celebration. It’s the living testament of St Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel, and if necessary use words”.

Rylands Building

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John Rylands (1801-1888) was a Manchester textile manufacturer whose name lives on in the John Rylands Library, founded as a memorial by his widow Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (1843-1908) and opened in 1900.

From 1822 his company, Rylands & Sons Ltd, occupied a site in the city’s High Street in what is now called the Northern Quarter, and replaced these premises with the Rylands Building (1929-32), a bulky modern textile warehouse on Market Street faced in Portland stone with distinctive corner turrets, in a sober version of Art Deco.

The architects were Harry Smith Fairhurst (1868-1945) and his son Philip Garland Fairhurst (1900-1987). The elder Fairhurst had already built Lancaster House (1905-1910), India House (1906) and Bridgewater House (1912), all on Whitworth Street, and York House (1910-11, demolished 1974) on Major Street – all of them to the Manchester pattern of a packing house and wholesale showroom.

The Rylands Building is prominently visible at the corner of Piccadilly Gardens, an ornamental space opened up on the site of the demolished Manchester Royal Infirmary.

In 1957 the huge Rylands headquarters was bought by the owners of Paulden’s department store after a fire destroyed their All Saints premises south of the city centre. The splendid architectural treatment, inside and out, and the vast amount of floor space made the former warehouse an admirable retail store, which was rebranded by its ultimate owners, Debenhams, in 1973.

The debacle that led to the complete closure of the Debenhams chain in 2021 meant that the Rylands Building suddenly became a huge void in the heart of Manchester’s retail quarter – half a million square feet of retail floor-space over ten floors encased in a magnificent and prominent building within sight of the city’s tourist hub, Piccadilly Gardens, and within reach of the nearby Northern Quarter.

The way forward is Rylands Manchester. The developer AM Alpha gained permission for a scheme by Jeffrey Bell Architects adding four storeys on top of the present roof to compensate for carving an open atrium out of the centre bringing natural light within the building from the second to the seventh floor.

The project respects the appearance of the 1929 design while observing the Manchester Zero-Carbon Action Plan which aims to make Greater Manchester carbon-neutral by 2038 [Zero Carbon Manchester | Zero Carbon Manchester | Manchester City Council]. Insulation, glazing and energy provision will conform to expected future needs, and the respect for original architectural detail includes installing up-to-date Crittall Windows units corresponding with the appearance of the original fenestration.

The finished scheme will offer 70,000 square feet of retail space at ground level, 258,000 square feet of office space above and a winter garden on the sixth floor. The atrium storeys each include open space, terraced to provide sight of the sky and sheltered by a glazed roof: https://www.maxfordham.com/projects/the-rylands-building.

Work is expected to be completed by 2025, a tribute to Manchester’s efficacy in grabbing opportunities to improve the urban environment, as it did after the IRA bomb-attack in 1996.

An urban-explorer report uploaded in April 2023 reveals surviving architectural details in the less-frequented areas of the Rylands Building: Exploring Manchester’s Abandoned Debenhams: Found 1930s Secrets – YouTube.

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

Manx railways in the 21st century

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Isle of Man Railway between Port St Mary and Port Erin: locomotive 15 ‘Caledonia’

Wheels turn slowly in the Isle of Man. That’s why one-third of its steam railway continues to operate after 130 years, and why you can still ride on the first two cars delivered to what became the Manx Electric Railway in 1893: Senior movers | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

Inevitably, there have been losses. There was a cable tramway in Douglas until 1929, when it was scrapped – superannuated, unloved and unbelievably noisy. The Isle of Man Railway lines to Peel and Ramsey were closed in 1968 and lifted.

But each of the surviving nineteen-century transport systems – the steam railway (1874), the Douglas horse tramway (1876), the Manx Electric Railway (1893-99) and the Snaefell Mountain Railway (1895) – has more than enough rolling stock to sustain a vigorous present-day tourist trade.

There have been misfortunes: the Manx Electric lost part of its fleet in a depot fire in 1930. Two of the six Snaefell Mountain Railway cars have in recent years run away from the summit: no 3 smashed to pieces, fortunately without injuries or fatalities, in 2016. A second runaway, no 2, with crew and passengers on board, was brought to a safe halt the following year. There was a yard sale of surplus horse trams in 2016, all of which went to good homes for sums between £1,000 and £2,800 each.

This tight little island, 32 miles long and 14 miles wide at most, is the home of a unique collection of nineteenth-century rail transport lines still in full working order.

Tynwald, the Manx government, is considering how to develop these assets in future. The steam and electric railways are already tuned to the entertainment value of heritage transport, like their colleagues across in Blackpool, but the horse tramway has become bogged down in the vexed redevelopment of Douglas promenade. There is an excellent transport museum at Jurby in the north of the island, but the vehicles have not yet provided a mobile tourist attraction to supplement heritage rail.

The practicality of supplementing modern street transport with heritage services is proven across the world, evident in the success of San Francisco’s cable-cars and streetcars, the Melbourne City Circle and Hong Kong’s double-deckers (which look traditional but despite their appearance are in fact modernised).

Heritage rail has the double advantage of attracting enthusiasts who appreciate its historic appeal at the same time as ordinary tourists enjoy an uncommon holiday experience.

Visitors to the Isle of Man, as well as Manx residents, are invited to give their views on how the heritage transport should develop, in a survey that closes on August 13th 2023: Isle of Man Heritage Railways Independent Review and Economic Impact Assessment – Cabinet Office of the Isle of Man Government – Citizen Space.

This is an invitation to think imaginatively about how to make the island’s transport even more interesting and financially secure.

But bearing in mind the current lamentable state of the horse trams, it would be wise not to expect rapid change.

A long way from home

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Walking down the street in the centre of Hobart, Tasmania in 2017 I noticed a red double-deck tourist bus approaching and instantly recognised its destination display, ‘CITY/CIRCULAR’.

The typeface was unmistakably from my home city of Sheffield.

When I checked the vehicle’s history I found that it was indeed from Sheffield, dating from 1973, the year before Sheffield Transport Department merged into South Yorkshire Passenger Transport and the livery changed from the smart azure blue and cream to a more insipid coffee and cream. Its original identity was no: 299 in the Sheffield fleet, with the UK registration UWA 299L: 298. UWA 298L: Sheffield Transport | Sheffield Transport 298… | Flickr. This had been obscured by its Australian identity as part of Red Decker Tours Hobart Explorer fleet.

Red double-deckers are ubiquitous in locations that lend themselves to hop-on-hop-off city tours, whereas for ordinary services Australian bus operators have traditionally stuck to single-deck vehicles.

I’ve encountered British-style double-deck tourist buses as far away as Brisbane, Philadelphia, Sydney and Tokyo, but it’s never occurred to me to notice their provenance.

Some of these operations take pride in using genuine traditional London red buses, as in Niagara Falls and Christchurch, New Zealand.

Clearly, Red Decker Tours found it practical to import British buses to the Antipodes for the sake of the better view they offer visitors, though their website shop window shows that they now use purpose-built vehicles with panoramic windows as well as open top decks.

Destination art

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I was born in working-class post-war Sheffield to parents who were determined that I would have the educational opportunities that had been denied them between the wars.

They started early, teaching me to read at every opportunity, which included reading the destinations – and the fleet numbers – of the trams that went back and forth along Attercliffe Common outside our house.

The typeface of the blinds that Sheffield Corporation used for both tram and bus destinations is Curwen Sans, developed by the typographer Harold Curwen (1885-1949), and dating from 1912.

Harold Curwen was taught at the Central School of Arts & Crafts by Edward Johnston (1872-1944) and Eric Gill (1882-1940), respectively the designers of the London Transport Johnston font (1916) and Gill Sans (1928).

Curwen’s lettering is distinctive and I recognised it immediately when some years ago I spotted and afterwards bought a half-size canvas print of a Sheffield tram blind in an antique shop on the Abbeydale Road.

Like Johnston, the Curwen ‘O’ is a circle, as for practical purposes are the ‘C’, ‘G’ and ‘Q’. The ‘W’ is in fact two overlapping ‘Vs’. The bar, or middle stroke, of ‘E’ and ‘F’ protrudes, instead of being the same length as or less than those above and below. Perhaps this is to improve the legibility of a white-on-black sign on the front of an approaching vehicle.

The individual destinations are meticulously composed. Abbreviations – ‘ST.’ for ‘STREET’ and ‘RD.’ for ‘ROAD’ – are followed by dots. ‘HILLSBORO’’ has an apostrophe but ‘HUNTERS BAR’ oddly doesn’t. ‘WOODHOUSE ROAD’, which would only appear in the lower aperture below ‘INTAKE’ above it, has brackets.

Destinations too long to appear as a single line – ‘INTAKE/(ELM TREE)’, ‘CITY/(FITZALAN SQUARE)’ and ‘FOOTBALL/GROUND’ are displayed as two lines which are not of equal height. The top line is bigger than the bottom, following the typographical convention that the upper half of a line of letters is more noticeable than the bottom.

Even the sequence of destinations is carefully thought out, with displays grouped geographically, clockwise from north to west, to save unnecessary winding of the fiddly handle that turned the blind rollers.

In two well-produced films of the final year of Sheffield trams, tram crews mention the tedium of changing four sets of indicators at each end of a journey: Sheffield Tram 1960 – Meadowhead to Sheffield Lane Top – YouTube and Sheffield The Last Trams – YouTube.

Nowadays it’s all done by key-taps on a digital display.

Roller blinds are still manufactured, in plastic, primarily for owners of preserved heritage buses and trams: (2) Replica Blinds by PWC | Facebook.

Complete original rolls change hands for three-figure sums, though cut-up sections framed can cost as little as £10.

Like railway memorabilia – station signs and loco name and number plates – visual mementos of latter-day street-transport have become iconic.

Heart of the Tower

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Blackpool Tower is the epitome of entertainment-industry entrepreneurial genius, owing its origin to Alderman John Bickerstaffe (1848-1930), who started life as a seaman and lifeboatman before he became pub landlord, and as Mayor of Blackpool saw off the speculators who wished to build one of a series of steel towers at resorts in the north-west. John Bickerstaffe led the locally based company that created one of the most consistently profitable of all Blackpool’s attractions.

Blackpool Tower is a half-size replica of Gustav Eiffel’s Parisian tower, but the key to its financial strength has always been the building which encases the legs. It initially incorporated restaurants and bars, a menagerie, an aquarium, an assembly hall that quickly became a ballroom, and at its heart a circus.

The complex first opened to the public on Whit Monday 1894, a rainy day on which 70,000 visitors immediately demonstrated the Tower’s full money-making potential by pouring through the doors to keep dry. Admission to the building cost sixpence, with a further sixpence for the tower ascent and another sixpence for the circus show.

The centre-piece of the whole structure is the Circus, built between the four legs of the tower itself, with stabling for horses and other animals beneath the auditorium-rakes. The Circus offered a succession of animal and acrobatic acts, culminating in a water-spectacle finale in which the circus floor sank within a minute into a 35,000-gallon water-tank. For many years, holidaymakers on the promenade were regularly entertained by the sight of the Tower Circus elephants processing down to the beach for exercise.

Only in the circus can you see – encrusted within Frank Matcham’s Moorish plasterwork – the arches that brace the four legs which sit in deep concrete foundations. In a 70mph gale the top of the Tower deflects no more than an inch, and there’s never been any likelihood that the Tower would end up – as Lord Haw-Haw claimed in a Second World War radio broadcast – lying on the sands beside the Central Pier.

The ceiling of the Circus, 55 feet above ground level, forms the floor of the elevator-hall from which the Otis Elevator Company’s lifts ascended the tower. The hydraulic accumulators and jiggers which originally powered the passenger lifts, several small goods lifts and the circus water-spectacle were located within the tower-legs.

In July 1897 an electrical short-circuit set fire to the wooden decking at the top. The resulting spectacular blaze, which luckily began about 11pm after the lift had closed down, proved completely inaccessible and eventually burnt itself out. The only permanent damage arose when a lift counterweight plunged down the north-west leg into one of the boxes in the circus auditorium, where it remains to this day, hidden behind mirrors. The tower-top and the lift-service were restored in time for the 1898 season.

Animal acts at the Tower Circus ceased at the end of the season in November 1990. Now the entertainers are clowns and acrobats, and the circus floor descends into the tank at the end of the show: The Blackpool Tower Circus | The Most Famous UK Circus.

The only other place you can see this happen in Britain is the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome.

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.

Topless towers

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Piazza della Cisterna, San Gimignano, Italy

I’d always wanted to visit San Gimignano after reading about it, and then seeing the film Tea with Mussolini (1999).

I wonder if the towers [torri] of Tuscan hill-towns inspired Christopher Marlowe to give Faustus the line about “the topless towers of Ilium”.

The fourteen existing medieval skyscrapers in San Gimignano, erected in a race for status between rival families, are astonishing, though there were once seventy-two such towers on the skyline.

On my first short visit in 2018 the only historic site I visited seriously, in the 30°C heat, was the Collegiate Church [Duomo] where in Tea with Mussolini Judi Dench protects the frescoes.

They form a spectacular sequence, vividly illustrating the Old and New Testaments, the Last Judgement, the Annunciation, St Sebastian (who seems to have a high profile in this part of Tuscany) and the life of St Fina (otherwise St Serafina), whose shrine is in a side chapel with, in a gilded frame, the rough plank on which she lay for the last five years of her life.

The Chiesa di San Lorenzo di Ponte which stands at the end of the Via del Castello, contains precious frescoes that Judi Dench’s character would certainly have respected.

The early medieval images are indeed fine, but the church had been neglected and then shut down by disputes between rival religious orders, and the interior repeatedly suffered what the English translation of the Italian Wikipedia article calls “water infiltrations”. By the end of the eighteenth century the building was an oil mill and wine cellar. The church was eventually restored in the early twentieth century and reopened in 1937. It’s a remarkable survival.

When I returned in 2022, San Gimignano was the raison d’être of the entire holiday, a time to enjoy simply being there, with optional tourism.

San Gimignano is a place of serious historic significance that’s worth of study, but more than that it’s beautiful and atmospheric. There’s a golden hour in San Gimignano around 10.00am, after which the tourist buses unload.

I felt no need to keep up with what Philip Larkin called “ruin-bibber[s], randy for antique”. It’s enough simply to be there.

On my last evening I walked up to the Piazza della Cisterna and sat down at the Ristorante La Cisterna [Ristorante – Hotel Cisterna (www-hotelcisterna-it.translate.goog)], looking past the actual cisterna, or well-head, to the cluster of buildings in front of the Torre Grossa, the biggest tower of all in the town, 177 feet high.

I had plenty of time to admire the view, which I took as a sign that real cooking was taking place. My dinner, when it arrived, was delicious.

You don’t have to walk far to eat your way round San Gimignano.

Old Dorothy Cinema

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On visits to Llangollen, my gateway to holidays in North Wales, I’ve several times found my way into a legendary second-hand bookshop that I quickly realised had once been a cinema.

Its history is not typical of small-town picture houses.

The Horspool family had been seedsmen and nurserymen in Chirk and Llangollen since the 1870s and opened the Dorothy Café alongside their confectionery shop on Castle Street, Llangollen in 1918. There is no explanation of where the name Dorothy originated.

By the early 1930s the shop next door to the café was Norman Horspool’s greengrocery.

The Dorothy Cinema building utilised the back land behind two shops within a longer terrace. It opened in 1931 or 1932 (whichever source you believe) as a direct competitor to the Town Hall Cinema across the road.

The building consisted of a café and dance hall on the ground floor with an auditorium above, approached by a wide staircase that still exists.

The cinema seated four hundred: there was no balcony as such, but the back rows were raised, stadium style, facing a sixteen-foot proscenium.

British Acoustic sound was installed at the outset.

The Town Hall cinema across the road closed at the beginning of World War II, and the Dorothy became Llangollen’s only picture house.

As such, it seemed to weather the early decline of cinema attendance in the 1950s, and in 1955 the proscenium was extended to accommodate a wide screen twenty feet by eleven feet.

By the early 1960s, however, the game was up and the last film, Sammy Going South, was shown on October 16th 1963.

An experiment with bingo failed, and while the café and dance hall downstairs continued, the former cinema became a market and then an inimitable second-hand bookshop, Maxine’s Cafe & Books, now trading as Books Llangollen.

The place is piled high with 100,000+ volumes on every subject imaginable, stacked on the steps of the back rows, and clustered round the decorative proscenium frame.

On July 15th 2015 films returned to the Town Hall under a brand-name that pays tribute to the former competitor – the New Dot Cinema.

The dance hall and café is now S&G Bistro.

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