Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Nottingham’s Water Palaces 1: Bestwood Pumping Station

3 Replies
Former Bestwood Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

Former Bestwood Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire

There used to be few more splendid places to dine in Nottinghamshire than the Lakeside Restaurant, a spectacular conversion of one of Nottingham’s fine Victorian water-supply pumping stations.  (Currently it operates exclusively as a wedding venue:  lakeside-brochure-web.pdf.)

Nottingham was the birthplace of one of the greatest British civil engineers of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hawksley (1807-1893), who specialised in water-supply engineering and served as consulting engineer to the Nottingham Waterworks Company.  He was the first to prove it was feasible to provide twenty-four-hour supply, a convenience that made water-closets fully practical.

He was responsible for managing the huge increase in demand as the population of Nottingham grew in the nineteenth century by tapping the abundant supplies of water held in the Bunter Sandstone that lies beneath the town.

The Bestwood Pumping Station, built in 1869-73, was part of that great project.  The brick engine house was built in thirteenth-century French Gothic style with stone facings.

Its architectural splendour was a gesture towards the 10th Duke of St Albans, from whom the six-acre site was leased.  He had rebuilt his nearby residence, Bestwood Lodge, in 1865, so the pumping-station chimney is contained in a 172-feet-high Venetian Gothic staircase tower which leads to a viewing loggia.

The engines were constructed by Joseph Whitham of Leeds, with a capacity of three million gallons per day, drawn from a well 176 feet deep.  They were replaced by electric pumps in 1964 and dismantled in 1968.

Following a steeplejack’s report that the tower was unsafe because of mining subsidence, plans were announced in 1972 to demolish the historic buildings.

Faced with a public outcry, the chairman of Nottingham Corporation Water Committee, Councillor Len Squires (Labour), complained, “Nobody realised the building had any architectural merit whatsoever until we decided to pull it down.”

When the Nottingham Corporation Waterworks Department was taken over by Severn Trent, Bestwood Pumping Station became derelict, listed but apparently unusable.

In fact, its architectural merit made it a superb location for an upmarket restaurant and wedding venue, with a fitness suite in the former boiler house.

The building reopened as the Lakeside Restaurant in 1997 with a décor strongly reminiscent of Victorian country houses, later replaced by an understated colour scheme of sage green and gold.

The latest refurbishment has transformed the interior to a dramatic black and white scheme with tiny touches of gold that admirably brings out the decorative detail of the Victorian structural ironwork.

The beam floor provides a further function room, the Tower Suite, and the tower will eventually be open once building work is complete.

It’s an indication of the pride that Victorian municipalities took in their utilities that this practical waterworks should so successfully become an elegant place for fine dining.

The former Bestwood Pumping Station features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Temples of Sanitation’. For further details please click here.

The Lord’s Port

Leave a Reply

Port Erin, Isle of Man: remains of breakwater

Port Erin, Isle of Man: remains of breakwater

When you leave the Isle of Man Railway steam train at the terminus of Port Erin, a short walk from the station brings you to the most spectacular harbour on the island.

It’s no coincidence that the railway’s southern line terminates here.

Port Erin – in Manx Phurt Chiarn, the “Lord’s port” referring to the British sovereign, the Lord of Mann – was already a modest fishing port before the Manx economy developed with the arrival of steamships in the nineteenth century.

A huge breakwater, constructed with much effort between 1864 and 1876 at a cost of £80,000, was severely damaged by a storm in 1868, and the finished pier was utterly destroyed by a further storm in January 1884, which scattered concrete blocks weighing up to seventeen tons.

While the Port Erin harbour was being constructed, the railway lines from Douglas south to Port Erin and west to Peel were built.

Work on the railway began in 1872, but the unexpected arrival on the island in June 1873 of the Duke of Sutherland, chief of the railway company’s promoters, a month before official opening date, slowed the progress he had come to inspect.

Track was hurriedly shifted from the Port Erin line to Peel so that locomotive No 1 Sutherland could with appropriate ceremony enter Peel station, where it derailed, leaving the Duke to adjourn to the Creek Inn.  The Peel line opened on July 1st 1873, followed by the Port Erin service on August 1st 1874.

As the terminus of the steam railway line from Douglas from 1874, Port Erin slowly grew into a small town.

In 1900 the Port Erin Building Estate was laid out by Horrocks & Lomas for Richard Cain of Castletown.  In 1901 the managing company was reorganised and renamed the Athol Park Estate Company (Port Erin) Ltd, but there was little development before 1914.

In the optimistic climate of this period the Isle of Man Railway rebuilt Port Erin station in 1904.

Port Erin became neither the major harbour nor the thriving holiday resort its promoters intended.

Instead, it’s a charming and relaxing destination for Isle of Man holidaymakers.

There are few finer Manx experiences than sitting in the conservatory of the Falcon’s Nest Hotel [http://www.falconsnesthotel.co.uk], gazing out at the remains of the breakwater in the bay, or eating and drinking in the bar of the Bay Hotel [http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g616277-d1773319-Reviews-The_Bay_Hotel-Port_Erin_Isle_of_Man.html] on the harbour front.

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.

Cruising the Mekong River

Leave a Reply

Mekong River, Vietnam

Mekong River, Vietnam

The second great surface-travel experience of the Great Rail Journeys’ ‘Vietnam, Cambodia & the Mekong Delta’ [http://www.greatrail.com/tours/vietnam-cambodia-and-the-mekong-delta.aspx#VMG4] is the day-long speedboat-ride up the Mekong River to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

We spent the whole of Sunday sailing up the Mekong River from a place I’d never heard of, Cần Thơ, on a speedboat, a relaxing and revealing experience because the Mekong, with its various tributaries and distributaries, is a working river.

Its vessels range from tiny craft to huge coasters, carrying sand, rice and bricks to the coast, and there are ro-ro ferries of various sizes plying crossings at intervals.   The distributary from which we started was as wide as the Mersey at Liverpool;  upstream we joined a channel that was nearer to the width of the Humber at Grimsby.

There was a particularly impressive stretch of river lined with brick kilns, pouring out black smoke, a reminder that the smokestack industries that Britain eliminated after the Second World War remain in the Far East.

Before leaving Vietnam the crew topped up the tanks with fuel, while members of our group tried to work out what two young boys were doing in the water.  It appeared they were washing a dead pig.

The Vietnamese formalities were negligible:  our passports were processed by the boat crew, and all we had to do was get off the boat, sit around for five minutes and get back on again.  There was no attempt to match the passports to the people whatsoever.

In between the two border posts the crew lowered the Vietnamese flag at the bow and raised the Cambodian one, which seemed a polite gesture at least.

At the Cambodian border post a short distance upriver there was the full performance of queuing at a window, and much stamping and scribbling by a heavily uniformed officer, while the lady from the boat stapled slips into passport pages.  The process was lubricated by another member of the boat crew silently and dutifully delivering a couple of cases of Tiger Beer behind the counter.

The Cambodian stretch of the river contrasts starkly with downstream.  Suddenly the industry, the river-traffic and the populace vanished, and for well over an hour we travelled past fields with very few signs of activity and none of prosperity.

It’s clear that this place is decades behind its neighbour.  When you read up the history the reasons are obvious:  this is a nation with a tragic past of urban depopulation, genocide, famine.  No Cambodian family is untouched by this late-1970s trauma, yet apparently more than half its young population have no direct memory of it.

There are oddities about being in Cambodia.

A member of our group darkly remarked that the BBC News feed was running nine minutes late.

 

Caudwell’s Mill

Leave a Reply
Caudwell's Mill, Rowsley, Derbyshire

Caudwell’s Mill, Rowsley, Derbyshire

One of the most attractive Derbyshire places to visit for morning coffee, lunch or afternoon tea is Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley, a few minutes’ drive from Chatsworth or Haddon Hall:  http://www.caudwellsmill.co.uk.

The mill itself was built to produce flour and animal feed by John Caudwell in 1874, and he and his son Edward modernised it by replacing the original millstones with roller mills to make finer, purer flour for baking, and installing water turbines to power them.  The last phase of this installation, by the manufacturer Amme, Giesecke & Konegen, was in progress in August 1914:  the German labourers were promptly sent home but the engineers, having finished their work, were apparently interned in the Isle of Man until 1919.  Edward Caudwell eventually settled the bill in 1924.

Caudwell’s ran as a going concern until 1977, by which time it was recognised as an intact, complete example of a distinct phase in the development of modern milling technology.

It was listed Grade II* and taken over by a trust with support from the landowner, the Duke of Rutland’s Haddon Estate, the local planning authority, the Peak Park Planning Board, and a small army of local people, industrial archaeologists and millers with financial assistance from, among others, the Architectural Heritage Fund, the Carnegie (UK) Trust, the Countryside Commission, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Science Museum.

The mill itself is open to the public, a fascinating warren of band-driven machines, hoists and Archimedean screws.  One of the turbines generates the electricity for the site.  The mill shop sells flour, oats and yeast – everything you need for quality home baking.  In the surrounding yard are craft-shops, a blacksmith, an upholsterer, a glass-maker and a jewellery maker:  artisans | Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley (caudwellsmill.co.uk).  

The café is vegetarian and provides the sort of cream cakes that look as if they’d qualify as five-a-day:  hlaf cafe | Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley (caudwellsmill.co.uk).

All this lies beside the waters of the River Wye, in one of the most beautiful of Derbyshire valleys.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Liverpool’s life story

Leave a Reply

Museum of Liverpool: Liverpool Overhead Railway 3

Museum of Liverpool: Liverpool Overhead Railway 3

Liverpool’s trio of Edwardian buildings fronting Pier Head – the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the former Mersey Docks & Harbour Board Building – are collectively known as the “Three Graces”.

The design of Liverpool’s “Fourth Grace” – to occupy Mann Island, the space next to the Pier Head group – brought lengthy controversy.

The initial scheme, for Will Alsop’s design “The Cloud”, described by one journalist as a “diamond knuckleduster”, was eventually dismissed as expensive and impractical:  http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/nov/21/regeneration.europeancapitalofculture2008, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jul/20/europeancityofculture2008.arts and http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jul/24/architecture.communities.

The eventual outcome was the Museum of Liverpool by the architects 3XN and engineers Buro Happold, an altogether quieter building that provides a surprising amount of space for exhibits and offers superb views along the river front.

Here at last are opportunities to savour some of the most significant major exhibits that could rarely if ever be displayed in the limited amount of museum space that was previously available.

The Liverpool & Manchester Railway locomotive Lion, built in 1837, latterly the star of the 1953 film The Titfield Thunderbolt and last steamed in 1989, rests alongside a reproduction stretch of the former Liverpool Overhead Railway viaduct, on which stands the one remaining vehicle from that much-mourned fleet.

Upstairs, the great model of the unbuilt Roman Catholic Cathedral designed between the wars by Sir Edwin Lutyens stands before a panorama showing exactly how this vast structure would have dominated the Liverpool skyline and streetscape.

Perhaps most fascinating of all, in the amount of time it demands, is Ben Johnson’s huge, minutely-detailed painting ‘Liverpool Cityscape’ (2005-8) commissioned for the Liverpool Capital of Culture Year and now permanently displayed at the Museum.

These are the star attractions of a rich, constantly evolving museum that celebrates one of the vibrant cities in the UK:  http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mol/things-to-see.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

The seventh generation

Leave a Reply

John Lloyd, Stonemason, Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire

John Lloyd, Stonemason, Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire

Participants in my 2012 Waterways & Railways between Thames & Severn tour were bemused when I insisted on stopping in the Wiltshire village of Great Bedwyn to look at the post office.

Ostensibly it had nothing to do with waterways or railways but the building is a delight because it’s the historic base of the stonemasonry business of John Lloyd [http://www.johnlloydofbedwyn.com/our-experience], a family firm dating back seven generations to the arrival of Benjamin Lloyd in 1790 in connection with the cutting of the Kennet & Avon Canal.

The post office itself and the yard beside it are encrusted with monumental panels, miscellaneous carvings, offcuts, uncollected orders, rejected pieces of all kinds.

A Daily Telegraph article [Hamish Scott, ‘Say it with stone’, September 21st 1996 [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/say-it-with-stone-1364250.html] about John Lloyd records his laconic advocacy of taking time and care to respect natural stone:  “You have to listen to its ring. If the note changes, then you’re doing something wrong. The stone will tell you what you can get away with, so long as you respect it.”

John Lloyd no longer manufactures on the site.  One of the most spectacular lots sold at an auction in 2009 was a memorial to a First World War airman – a stone Sopwith Camel with an eleven-foot wingspan.

Still remaining are a selection of eccentricities, including the ‘Repairs to a monument’, an account in stone of the mason’s work and his charges.

Sham Castles

Leave a Reply

The Towers, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

The Towers, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Castle-by-the-Sea, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Castle-by-the-Sea, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Scarborough has three castles – the genuine article which dates back to Roman times, and two Victorian shams which have their own unique appeal.

The Scarborough brewer Thomas Jarvis built The Towers, designed by William Baldwin Stewart in 1866, immediately below the gatehouse of the medieval castle on the promontory that divides Scarborough’s two bays.

He later added the Castle-by-the-Sea, which overlooks the North Bay, at the other end of the little street that became Mulgrave Place, and in 1876 leased it to the Leeds artist, Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893).

Atkinson Grimshaw was the son of a Leeds policeman, an ex-railway-clerk who without formal training executed canvases of dusk and moonlight scenes, mainly of coast and harbour settings, with considerable commercial success.

One of his first and finest Scarborough works is ‘Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, the Burning of the Spa Saloon’ (1876), which was probably commissioned by Jarvis and was painted in great haste for the sake of topicality but not publicly exhibited.  It is now in the Scarborough Art Gallery [http://www.scarboroughartgallery.co.uk], along with ‘Scarborough Lights’ (c1877), ‘Burning off a Fishing Boat at Scarborough’ ) and ‘Lights in the Harbour, Scarborough’ (1879).

Atkinson Grimshaw reputedly influenced Bram Stoker into setting Dracula in Whitby.

He’s also regarded as a possible influence on Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the Whitby photographer.

He returned to Leeds in 1879 after getting into financial difficulties, and went on to paint numerous scenes in Hull, Liverpool, London and Glasgow Docks.

The Castle-by-the-Sea is a notably welcoming bed-and-breakfast hotel, one of the pleasantest places to stay in Scarborough:  http://www.thecastlebythesea.co.uk.

The Towers is a private residence and not open to the public.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, 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 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The finest gents in the North West

Leave a Reply

Philharmonic Hotel, Liverpool: gentlemen's lavatory

Philharmonic Hotel, Liverpool: gentlemen’s lavatory

One of the great Liverpool experiences is having a drink – or perhaps more than one drink – in the Philharmonic Hotel (1898-1900) on the opposite corner of Hope Street to the Philharmonic Hall from which it takes its name.

This palace of a pub is the result of a partnership of the architect Walter W Thomas and Robert Cain’s Brewery during the great boom in public-house building at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Thomas was well-funded and fortunately placed to call on the formidable design-skills of the Liverpool University School of Architecture and Applied Art and of the Liverpool craftsmen who executed the decorative schemes of the interiors of the great ocean-liners built by Cammell Laird across the Mersey in Birkenhead.

The exterior of the Philharmonic Hotel is an odd combination of Scottish Baronial and Art Nouveau, with elaborate iron gates by the German-American artist H Blomfield Bare, who also designed the repoussé copper panels inside.

The interior scheme was co-ordinated by George Hall Neale and Arthur Stratten, who employed Charles J Allen to produce the distinctive plaster caryatids and atlantes in the billiard room (the former modelled by his friend Mrs Ryan), the Irish plasterer Pat Honan and the stone-carver Frank Norbury.

The gentlemen’s lavatories at the Philharmonic Hotel are not to be missed.  Indeed, the protocol is that any respectable lady customer can ask any respectable gentleman customer to check the coast is clear so she can admire the marble, the mosaic and the brass-work of this palatial pissoir.

John Lennon declared that one of the disadvantages of fame was “not going to The Phil any more”.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Robben Island

Leave a Reply

Robben Island, Cape Town, South Africa

Robben Island, Cape Town, South Africa

The single essential place to visit in Cape Town is Robben Island, the flat, parched patch in the bay where political prisoners have been incarcerated within sight of the city since the seventeenth century, and where three of the post-apartheid presidents of South Africa spent years of their lives – most famously Nelson Mandela (imprisoned on Robben Island 1962-1982, eventually released 1990), and also the third president Kgalema Motlanthe (imprisoned 1977-1987) and the present incumbent, Jacob Zuma (imprisoned 1963-1973).

When Robben Island wasn’t in use as a prison it served as a leper colony, where the lepers were originally admitted voluntarily but eventually brought there involuntarily.  It was also used as a medium-security prison for criminals.

It is a miserable place, yet unexpectedly uplifting.

When I visited Cape Town I made a point of booking a Robben Island tour [http://www.robben-island.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10&Itemid=11], and the white man who sold me my ticket was once Nelson Mandela’s jailer, the black man beside him behind the counter an ex-prisoner.

Over on the island, a thirty-minute catamaran trip away, we were bussed past the former leper colony, the lighthouse and the view of Table Mountain, before being introduced to the prison-guide, another ex-prisoner.

All tours are guided by ex-prisoners, so you get the message directly.

At one point the group simply sits in a meeting room to question the guide.  One tourist asked what was the greatest injustice done on the island, and the guide simply replied that the removal of freedom, the deprivation of life’s opportunities was the essential injustice.

I told him he’d taught me that much good occurred on the island, and he said, yes, the prisoners learned to depend on each other, to support and to develop their potentialities.

This isn’t merely a prison, like Alcatraz, but a crucible of political thinking and social revolution.  Kgalema Motlanthe wrote, of his time on Robben Island,–

We were a community of people who ranged from the totally illiterate to people who could very easily have been professors at universities.  We shared basically everything.  The years out there were the most productive years in one’s life, we were able to read,  we read all the material that came our way, took an interest in the lives of people even in the remotest corners of this world.  To me those years gave meaning to life.

A clip about Robben Island featured in the BBC News coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela.  I’ve no way of knowing if Christo Brand, featured in the clip, was the man I spoke to when I visited in 2000:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25296656.

 

District Six

Leave a Reply

District 6 Museum, Cape Town, South Africa

District Six Museum, Cape Town, South Africa

I first learnt about the poet Tatamkhulu Afrika when his poem ‘Nothing’s changed’, about post-apartheid South Africa [http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/tatamkhulu-afrika-nothings-changed-and-district-6/10291.html], appeared in a GCSE English anthology that I taught to fifteen-/sixteen-year-olds around 1999-2002.

The video-clip that came with the anthology [http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/tatamkhulu-afrika-nothings-changed-and-district-6/10291.html] revealed that, despite his pen-name, given to him by the ANC’s militant wing Umkhonto We Sizwe, he looked like a white man.

Tatamkhulu Afrika (1920-2002) was actually of Egyptian and Turkish descent, adopted by White South African parents who concealed his ethnic origin in order to give him better opportunities under apartheid.  As an adult he rebelled against this, converted to Islam and lived in the cosmopolitan community of District Six in Cape Town.

The poem expresses his anger at the destruction of District Six after the government declared it a white-only area and razed the buildings, exiling the polyglot population to the bleak Cape Flats area, a fifteen-mile rail journey from the city centre.

During the time I was repeatedly working with ‘Nothing’s changed’ with classes of teenagers, I happened to take a trip to South Africa and spent time in Cape Town.

I made a point of persuading a tour-guide to take me to the District Six Museum:  http://www.districtsix.co.za.

The Museum is in a Methodist chapel (one of the numerous places of Christian worship that were left standing) and the coloured guide was a veteran of the injustice.  Showing us a display of identity cards, alongside a whites-only park bench and a whites-only taxi-rank sign, he was able to point to his own picture.

It’s hard to comprehend the bitterness and anger that apartheid generated, and impossible not to admire the way that the new South Africa, for all its imperfections, has travelled so far in the twenty years since the abolition of apartheid.