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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Former Old Dorothy Cinema, Llangollen, Denbighshire
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.
Danum Museum, Doncaster: GNR No 251 and LNER 4771 ‘Green Arrow’
Danum Museum provides a dramatic surprise when visitors walk through a small door to be confronted by two full-size steam locomotives, parked in an exhibition hall to mark Doncaster’s geographical importance at the centre of England’s transport arteries.
Doncaster was a bridging point on Ermine Street, the Roman road to the North, and a stage stop on the Great North Road that became the highway to Scotland from the Middle Ages onwards.
It was an obvious site for a railway junction when the Great Northern Railway forged its way north from King’s Cross, joining end-on with its partner the North Eastern Railway south of York in 1852 to form what is now called the East Coast Main Line.
The Great Northern acquired acres of flat land around the town for goods yards, locomotive stabling and its locomotive and carriage works, a huge complex that became known as “the Plant”.
From its opening in 1853 until 1867 the Plant undertook repairs and maintenance only, but after the arrival of the great locomotive engineer Patrick Stirling (1820-1895) Doncaster became the birthplace of some of the finest and most famous steam locomotives in Britain for the Great Northern Railway and its successor, the London & North Eastern Railway.
The Stirling Single, Great Northern No: 1, built in 1870, is an elegant express engine with single driving wheels 8ft 1in in diameter. It broke records in the hair-raising Races to the North in 1888 and 1895. The first of its type, it’s the only survivor.
Stirling’s next-but-one successor, Nigel Gresley (1876-1941; knighted 1936) designed his A1 Pacific locomotives, of which the most famous example, Flying Scotsman, claimed the first authenticated 100mph speed record in 1934, and his streamlined A4 Pacific, Mallard, took the ultimate speed record for a steam locomotive, 126mph, in its construction year, 1938.
Danum Museum’s current exhibits from the National Collection are a matching pair of unique survivors, both the first of their class. The C1 Large Atlantic, the unnamed no: 251, built in 1902, was the first of a long-lived and powerful class of express locomotive designed by Henry A Ivatt (1851-1923), who served as locomotive superintendent between Stirling and Gresley.
Its companion is LNER no: 4771 Green Arrow, built in 1936 as an express mixed-traffic loco, equally capable of handling fast passenger and freight trains.
To stand close to these beautiful giants side by side, resplendent in their apple-green livery, evokes the railway tradition that generations of Doncaster workers built and maintained at the Plant.
As its name suggests, Doncaster dates back to Roman times, yet despite centuries of importance as an administrative, social and industrial centre, it is one of the newest British cities, awarded Letters Patent confirming its city status in 2022 on the occasion of the Platinum Jubilee of HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Coincidentally, it has gained a superb new museum, art gallery and central library, named after the original Roman fort, Danum, that probably existed where the parish church of St George, now Doncaster Minster was later built.
The Danum Gallery, Library and Museum stands on the site of the Doncaster Girls’ High School, which dates from 1910-11 and was designed by J M Bottomley, Son & Wilburn in bright red brick, contrasting starkly with elegant white Burmantofts ‘Marmo’ faience.
Latterly it amalgamated with the corresponding boys’ Doncaster Grammar School, renamed Hall Cross Comprehensive School, part of which still occupies its 1869 George Gilbert Scott building on Thorne Road.
The entrance leads into an entirely conventional modern lending library, brightened by full height windows. Following the line of the windows leads to a surprising space dominated by the spruced-up brick and faience façade of the old school. Here is Café 1910, where welcoming, homely Yorkshire ladies provide satisfying hot drinks, healthy snacks and irresistible cakes and pastries. Their warm, well-mannered Facebook stream reflects their style and their service.
Behind the school frontage, the Museum and Art Gallery explores the rich variety of Doncaster’s history in a sequence of displays that leads the visitor from the local ichthyosaurus and the Norman Conisbrough Castle to living legends such as Doncaster’s Diva, Lesley Garrett, in a 2022 portrait by Michael Christopher Jackson, and One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson. The Museum also tells the story of the local regiment, The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
Uniting four previously cultural facilities – library, archives, art gallery and museum – in one location with a café makes it possible to look at art and artefacts, read and research, and eat and drink in comfort.
As someone who is prone to overstimulation and sore feet in museums and art galleries this is a welcome luxury.
In Berlin after 1945 the priorities were necessities. Half the buildings in the city were uninhabitable and the division of the city into four sectors compounded the difficulties of everyday life.
No-one had much time to consider historical conservation or what was left of the built environment.
And yet, the uproar over the demolition of the Anhalter Bahnhof showed that significant numbers of Berliners were keen to keep some built reminders of the historic city, not least to ensure that the horrors of the end of the war were not forgotten.
The most conspicuous of these reminders is of the course the Reichstag, notoriously burnt down in 1933, almost the last redoubt in the battle for the city in 1945, finally restored in 1999.
In the bustling Kurfürstendamm, however, stands a more poignant reminder of the impact of war – the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church [Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche], or rather the blasted remains of its substantial tower, which people call “der hohle Zahn – the Hollow Tooth”. The church was designed by Franz Heinrich Schwechten, who had made his name with the Anhalter Bahnhof, and it was dedicated in 1895 as a memorial to the first German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm I (1797-1888).
Most of the remains of the church were taken down as unsafe after the end of the war, and the architect of the reconstruction, Egon Eiermann (1904-1970), proposed to demolish the old tower but was prevented by a public outcry.
Instead, alongside a new octagonal church and a separate hexagonal bell-tower (1959-63), the gaunt ruin of the 1895 church stands as a landmark and a symbol of hope and reconciliation. The walls of the new church are a concrete honeycomb, lit by blue stained glass which floods the interior. There are six bronze bells in the new tower, the largest of which is inscribed “Your cities are burned with fire.” (Isaiah 1:7) and “But my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.” (Isaiah, 51:6).
The new church was consecrated on May 25th 1962, the same day that Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German bombs in 1940 and rebuilt alongside the ruins, was also consecrated.
The parallels with Coventry Cathedral are powerful, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is a recipient of a Coventry cross of nails, which is displayed next to the damaged statue of Christ which stood on the original altar.
The only surviving interior of the 1895 church is the entrance lobby, rich with gilding and mosaics, the cracks resulting from the bombing filled but left visible like Japanese kintsugi [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi].
It’s an overbearing space, lightened a little by the contrast of the modern exhibition dedicated to peace and reconciliation.
It’s easy to see why the Allied administrators were not anxious to preserve the unstable walls of the bombed nave, a temple to the aspirations of Wilhelm I’s newly united Germany from which had sprung two world wars.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church lacks the sense of wholeness of Coventry Cathedral, where the ruins of the old become a prelude and a pendant to Sir Basil Spence’s 1962 church, or the integrity of St Martin’s Church, Coney Street, York or St Luke’s Church, Liverpool, where in each case the altered form of the bombed church reminds the visitor of what happened and invites reflection.
But after even a moments’ consideration of the rigours of life in late 1940s Berlin, we must be grateful that some raised their voices and persuaded Egon Eiermann to keep the tower as a reminder of the darkest days of the city’s and the German nation’s history.
Nottingham City Transport has celebrated its 125th anniversary by decking out one of its double-deckers in a Nottinghamshire-themed livery, based on the county flag, with images of twenty Nottingham landmarks, five of which are visible on the offside in my friend Harriet’s image.
The Nottingham horse-tram services, dating from 1878, were taken over by the Corporation in 1898 and swiftly electrified from 1901 onwards.
This modest, conventional first-generation tram operator gained a reputation for modernity and innovation.
Petrol buses were introduced in 1906, but when the tram system was life-expired in the late 1920s, Nottingham chose to retain the electricity-supply system and use trolleybuses. The fleet continued to grow after the Second World War to a maximum size of 155 vehicles.
Thereafter, developments focused on using diesel vehicles, and the last trolleybuses ran in 1966. The first one-man-operated bus appeared in 1951; the neighbouring West Bridgford UDC transport service was absorbed in 1968.
NCT currently operates a bright yellow bio-gas double-decker named after Honorary Alderman Betty Higgins (1926-2019), the first female leader of Nottingham City Council, who among many inspired initiatives ensured that the city kept its municipal transport when the 1986 Transport Act forced bus services into the private sector, where they were quickly acquired by national operators such as Arriva, First and Stagecoach.
She served as chairman of the housing committee, where she cleared the city not only of unfit housing but also of the unsuitable 1960s and 1970s flats that had been hastily built to enable “slum clearance”.
Her insight and forethought allowed the city to keep its transport system in an arm’s-length private operation that wasn’t vulnerable to absorption into a remote national network.
Although Transdev has a 14% minority share in Nottingham City Transport – a consequence of the financing of the city’s light rapid-transit network – the undertaking is one of a very small remaining number of major municipal bus operators, along with Blackpool, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Ipswich and Reading.
Nottingham is an easy city to get about. When I visit, if I don’t travel in by train, I park at the Phoenix Park park-and-ride, five minutes away from the M1 Junction 28, and take the tram. You hardly need a car in Nottingham.
I have several mates called Richard, and the one who lives in Selby is seldom seen because of his demanding job. We meet up when we can, usually at a halfway point between Sheffield and Selby.
Recently we agreed to rendezvous at Knaresborough, which has a good train service via Leeds, and we met on the railway station where I’d noticed a coffee shop as I arrived.
It’s apparent that Knaresborough Railway Station is itself a destination.
We parked ourselves in a sunny bay window at The Old Ticket Office, which is exactly what its name suggests. We’d much to catch up on and stayed on for lunch – excellent hot and cold sandwiches made to order. Indeed, we’d have stayed on in the afternoon if they hadn’t closed at 2.00pm, so we had a further cup of coffee at the Mitre pub across the road.
Richard questioned why a small town like Knaresborough has a such frequent train service, and I suggested the present-day answer is that it provides Knaresborough and Harrogate with a link to main-line services at Leeds and York, just as Barnsley railway station gives its locality access to Leeds and Sheffield.
The Beeching Plan envisaged closing the line through Knaresborough, but Barbara Castle, as Minister of Transport, subsequently reprieved it in 1966.
In 2019-20, before the pandemic, the unstaffed Knaresborough station served over 400,000 passenger journeys and it’s been promised electrification at some undetermined future date.
Its Grade II listed buildings are an attraction in their own right.
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