Category Archives: Sacred Places

No expense spared 3: Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Liverpool

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Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Princes Road, Liverpool

Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Princes Road, Liverpool

Among the many fine Victorian buildings in and around Liverpool 8, the Old Hebrew Congregation Syngogue is a particular jewel.

Built 1871-4 to the designs of the brothers William James and George Ashdown Audsley, it is constructed, like St Margaret’s Church on the same side of Princes Road, of red brick dressed with red sandstone.

Its façade combines elements of Gothic and Moorish styles, the pointed west door and the rose window contrasting with the oriental arches of the doorframes and the minarets that once surmounted the turrets.

The spectacular galleried interior has a tall arcade, supported by cast-iron columns with acanthus capitals. The horseshoe arches of the arcade lead the eye to the much more elaborate arch at the east end, which frames another rose window above the marble Ark with painted domes and gold stars.

The initial total cost was £14,975 8s 11d.

The marble pulpit, given in 1874 by the widow of James Braham, faces the bimah, the platform from which the Torah and haftarah are read. This was the gift of David Lewis, founder of the Liverpool department store, “in gratitude to Almighty God for His great goodness”.

The Ark is a replacement of the original which with its holy scrolls was destroyed by arson in May 1979: it was reconstructed and the synagogue restored and reopened in December 1980.

This spectacular place is open to group tours, which feature an exhibition about the history of the congregation: http://www.princesroad.org/#!tours/cfvg.

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

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

Exploring Saigon: Notre-Dame Basilica

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Basilica of Notre-Dame, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Basilica of Notre-Dame, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Of all the interesting places I visited in Vietnam with Great Rail Journeys’ ‘Vietnam, Cambodia & the Mekong Delta’ tour, I’m most likely to return to Saigon, perhaps as a stopover en route to Australia or New Zealand.

Our local guide was at pains to point out that the official name Hồ Chí Minh City is a formality which can lead to embarrassment, when disparaging the city insults the political leader, and so Saigon [Sài Gòn] is the customary name to use.

Across Vietnam I repeatedly spotted unmistakably Gothic churches which must reflect the French colonisation, but the only one I had the opportunity to visit, very briefly, was the Basilica of Notre-Dame in the centre of Saigon.

Wikipeda meticulously renders its Vietnamese names Vương cung thánh đường Đức Bà Sài Gòn or Nhà thờ Đức Bà Sài Gòn as well as the Vietnamese rendition of its alternative title, the Basilica of Our Lady of The Immaculate Conception –Vương cung thánh đường Chính tòa Đức Mẹ Vô nhiễm Nguyên tội.

Constructed entirely of French materials in a weird combination of Byzantine and Gothic styles from 1877 to 1880, the basilica’s Marseilles bricks and twin spires suggest a jazzed-up version of A W N Pugin’s Cathedral of St Chad, Birmingham.

The towers were in fact additional, built to contain six bronze bells each in 1895. To the tips of the crosses, each tower is 60.5 metres high. At the time of construction these were the tallest structures in Saigon.

Though Christianity is a minority religion in Vietnam, Notre Dame is heavily used. It has survived so many wars and upheavals, and remains a focal point in the city.

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

Preacher Man 2

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Epworth Old Rectory, North Lincolnshire

Epworth Old Rectory, North Lincolnshire

It’s not uncommon to hear American voices in the small North Lincolnshire market town of Epworth.

Indeed, when I visited Epworth Old Rectory with a British friend one summer afternoon, the other visitors, a coach-party of around twenty and a couple on a pilgrimage, were without exception Americans.

Epworth is seen, quite literally, as the birthplace of Methodism, because the rector in the early eighteenth century was the Rev Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) of whose nineteen children three boys and seven girls survived.  The three boys were Samuel the Younger (1690 or 1691-1739), a minor poet, John (1703-1791), cleric and theologian and founder of the Methodist Church, and Charles (1707-1788), the hymn-writer.

Rev Samuel Wesley was not popular in his Epworth living:  he was a high Tory and a high churchman, and didn’t get on with his parishioners.

The existing parsonage was burnt down in 1709, a particularly alarming incident in which his son John, known within the family as Jacky, was trapped in a second-floor bedroom and rescued only with difficulty.

Had he perished, there would have been no Methodist church as such.

The Wesley children’s upbringing was meticulous.  Their mother Susanna educated the boys and girls to the same level, and found time to teach each of the ten individually on a weekly basis.

This methodical approach to mundane as well as intellectual tasks was distinctive of John Wesley’s university life, and led him and his friends to be scornfully labelled “methodists”, an epithet which they joyfully accepted.

Throughout his long life of preaching, John Wesley encountered furious opposition from clergy of the Established Church, not least in Epworth where, on return visits to his birthplace, he was denied access to the parish church and took to standing on his father’s grave to preach.

“Consumed by the thought of the shortness of time, the great work to be done, and the need for haste in doing it, on he marched, preaching, pleading, warning and guiding…” until, by the time of his death, he had unwittingly created an alternative Protestant church to Anglicanism.

And that is why visitors come from all over the world to an elegant Georgian parsonage in North Lincolnshire:  http://www.epwortholdrectory.org.uk.

Sir John Brown’s church

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All Saints' Church, Ellesmere Road, Sheffield (1976)

All Saints’ Church, Ellesmere Road, Sheffield (1976)

My local community magazine, the Burngreave Messenger (Issue 112, June 2014), recently included an article by Elizabeth and Gordon Shaw about the Cornerstone, a stone-built community centre on the corner of Carwood Road and Grimesthorpe Road on the hill above Sheffield’s industrial east end.

The article proudly commemorates the continuous 127-year history of what was originally the meeting hall (1887) for the now vanished All Saints’ Church, Ellesmere Road, founded in 1869 by the steel magnate John Brown (1816-1896, Sir John Brown from 1867).

It’s good that this modest building is still used and valued, but it’s a pity Sir John’s great church was demolished in 1978:  http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3824154.

Like his neighbour and rival, Mark Firth, John Brown rose from humble origins in the Sheffield cutlery trade:  his successive breakthroughs were inventing the conical spring railway-buffer, which he eventually included in his coat of arms, manufacturing railway rails from Bessemer steel and rolling armour plate to clad ships of the Royal Navy.

On the hill above his works Sir John erected a magnificent Gothic church designed by Flockton & Abbott with a spire that could be seen from miles around.  When the original budget of £5,000 proved inadequate he flatly refused to accept a contribution from the Church Extension Society:  the final cost was £12,000.

This huge, cruciform parish church would have served as a small cathedral.  It inevitably became unsupportable as the surrounding housing was cleared.

It and the neighbouring Petre Street Methodist Chapel were replaced by a diminutive Local Ecumenical Partnership building, St Peter’s Ellesmere, which has a token spire.

When All Saints’ came down the eight bells were rescued and passed on to the 1911 Austen & Paley church of St Anne, Worksop.  The war-memorials were transferred to St George’s, Portobello, which itself closed in 1981 and is now used by Sheffield University for lectures and student accommodation.

All Saints’ is the biggest single architectural loss, as a historic building and as a landmark, in the Lower Don Valley, the site of Sheffield’s heavy steel industry, a place with little beauty and a tremendous story to tell.

The demolition of All Saints’ Church, Ellesmere Road is illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

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

Stone-by-stone analysis

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All Saints' Church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire

All Saints’ Church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire

If I could only have one subscription to a historical association it would be with the Ancient Monuments Society:  http://www.ancientmonumentssociety.org.uk.  Their periodic newsletter is a fount of information about historic buildings and books about historic buildings, listing events and tours, including mine.  The annual Transactions is learned and authoritative:  the 2014 edition, for instance, ranges from Birmingham Town Hall to parkland buildings associated with hunting, Catholic buildings in Norwich, parsonages and the early conservation movement in Edinburgh Old Town.

The book-review section of the Transactions delves deep into the realms of scholarship.  The titles reviewed usually cost tens of pounds;  the reviewers make learned distinctions between ‘axiometric’ (which hasn’t yet reached the dictionary) and ‘axonometric’, and ‘homogenous’ and ‘homogeneous’, and express enthusiasms that would not be understood in my local pub:  “Parochial benching is more than ever a hot topic just now”  “…a fascinating account of the decorative use of the iron punch, which woodwork aficionados will find riveting”.

Richard Halsey’s review of the latest study of Brixworth Church, Northamptonshire, [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Anglo-Saxon-Church-Brixworth-Northamptonshire/dp/1842175319/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399276060&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Anglo-Saxon+Church+of+All+Saints%27+Brixworth+Northamptonshire+survey+excavation+and+analysis] reminds me of how much further investigation of historic buildings can go than would ever occur to the casual visitor.

The late-eighth century church of All Saints’, Brixworth, is the largest surviving Anglo-Saxon building in England.  Though it was altered in the tenth, thirteen and nineteenth centuries, it’s our best opportunity to appreciate the scale of long vanished Saxon cathedrals such as Canterbury and Winchester.  It’s a supremely important monument in the catalogue of buildings, not only in England but in northern Europe as a whole.

The 2013 study edited by David Parson and Diana Sutherland is the result of forty years’ research by the Brixworth Archaeological Research Committee [BRAC].  Part of Diana Sutherland’s contribution to the knowledge about the church involved using a scaffold to map each stone in the Saxon masonry to determine its geology and petrology.

That’s aeon away from walking in, taking a few photos and buying a guidebook, as I did.

Richard Halsey points out that forty years of funded research yields sufficient data to pack a 326-page book and still leaves significant questions unanswered:  what was the Saxon roof like?  why was the original west end demolished and replaced by the tenth-century tower?  why was such a huge church built in this place?

There’s so much more to learn that feeds into scholarship about the distant past, and particularly about other surviving pre-Norman churches:  http://www.interestingtimestours.co.uk/index.php?mact=CGBlog,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=44&cntnt01returnid=87.

Last word on St Hilda’s

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (March 13th 2014)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (March 13th 2014)

No sooner had I posted a blog-article complaining that St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield had stood a roofless ruin for six months than the demolition team moved in.

Within a week, March 10th-14th 2014, the building was flattened – an eyesore that need never have been an eyesore. The earliest reference I’ve so far found to the possibility of  closure is in 1993.  As late as 2004, Ruth Harman and John Minnis clearly thought it merited an illustration in their Pevsner  Architectural Guide Sheffield (2004), p 188. By the time I became aware it was threatened and my neighbours started a campaign to save it at the end of 2011 it was far too late to have any effect. This is what I’ve learned from following the fate of St Hilda’s Church:
  • the Church of England’s procedure for disposing of redundant churches is ponderous, glacially slow and largely ignores the possibility that the secular community might resolve the problems of disposal
  • local politicians, hammered for a generation by central governments’ stripping away of their autonomy, think in terms of solving problems rather than exploring possibilities
  • the network of amenity organisations, particularly English Heritage and the national amenity societies, prioritises its concerns in terms of national perspectives, with a bias against twentieth-century architecture and buildings of purely local significance
  • just as the churches declined because people think they’re going to be there for ever and never set foot across the threshold, so local people will sign petitions but aren’t inclined to participate actively in seeking uses for derelict local buildings
It was always on the cards that St Hilda’s would go. One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable. The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom. For details please click here.

St Cecilia’s lingers

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St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield – nave & baptistery

St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield – nave & baptistery (2013)

After I’d taken part in the Church Commissioners’ meeting to discuss the redundancy and proposed demolition of St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield, I spent some time talking to people in the Parson Cross community about the building’s practical possibilities.

Apparently, there aren’t any.

Local community workers told me that there’s already full provision of community facilities on the Parson Cross and neighbouring Foxhill estates:  a further facility, if it could be financed, would threaten the viability of those already existing.

Public finance is, of course, an impossibility.

One City Councillor told me with understandable passion of the difficulties of maintaining social provision in the face of draconian financial cuts.  One particular priority at present, justifiably, is somehow to maintain a branch library within reach of local residents.

Yet the emotional pull of St Cecilia’s still remains.  A clergyman spoke movingly of how the building holds the prayers of seventy years of congregational worship, and is a monument to the revered Kelham Fathers who built up the parish from nothing.

The one positive insight I heard came from someone with enterprise experience:  “The only hope for that building,” he said, “is serendipity.”

That, after all, is what happened at Gorton Monastery in Manchester, the Abbeydale Cinema on the south side of Sheffield, and the former St Thomas’ Church, Brightside, which is now Greentop Circus.

The Gorton Monastery project was co-founded by Elaine Griffiths, MBE;  the Abbeydale Cinema turned a corner when Phil Robins spotted its possibilities as a climbing centre;  the founders of Greentop Circus had the wit to challenge Anneka Rice.

In other words, the only possibility of finding a use for the building is if someone comes along with a practical idea that no-one else has thought of.

The only way of saving St Cecilia’s is for someone who needs an attractive space on the north side of Sheffield to come up with a business plan that relieves the Church Commissioners of the need to spend nearly £200,000 knocking the place down brick by brick to the great inconvenience of the neighbours.

St Hilda’s lingers

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (September 27th 2013)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (September 27th 2013)

Last August the scaffolding went up around St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield, and it was apparent that it would be demolished. I was told that the schedule was to have the site cleared by the end of September 2013. A cheerful crew duly turned up and over a matter of two or three weeks removed the entire roof. Then they went away, and nothing further has happened. The place continues to stand a roofless ruin. My diocesan source tells me that the delay results from “discussion between the Sheffield City Council Planning Department, Church Commissioners, Diocese and the Contractor”. The Church authorities don’t seem to have much luck either with keeping redundant buildings standing or knocking them down. St Hilda’s is now neither one thing nor the other. It’s perhaps mischievous to point out that roofless churches have been preserved against all the odds, such as the Welsh Presbyterian Church, Toxteth, Liverpool [http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/toxteths-welsh-presbyterian-church-new-6086259] and the Welsh Baptist Chapel, Upper Brook Street, Manchester  [http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/the-unitarianchapel-upper-brook-street-manchester]. Both these examples are listed, and are of undeniable historical and architectural merit. But sometimes even the most unassuming derelict buildings gain a purpose that keeps them standing and restored to good order:  https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=1461. Update – March 11th 2014:  The interrupted demolition of St Hilda’s has resumed, and it should be gone within a matter of days. One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable. The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom. For details please click here.

Greentop Circus

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Former St Thomas' Church, Brightside, Sheffield, now Greentop Circus

Former St Thomas’ Church, Brightside, Sheffield, now Greentop Circus

Because of the discussions about the future of the redundant St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield, I’m looking at examples of successful conversions of redundant religious buildings which have preserved the architecture while enabling the building to earn its keep.

I’ve already written about the former St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, Seel Street, Liverpool (now a restaurant) and the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Attercliffe, Sheffield (now a mosque) and the spectacular revival of the Monastery of St Francis, Gorton.

One of the best examples I’ve come across is the former St Thomas’ Church, Brightside, Sheffield, a modest Victorian parish church of 1854 by the local architects Flockton & Son, built to serve the first growth of artisan housing as the steelworks crept across the Lower Don Valley after the arrival of the railway in 1838.

It’s a more modest building than Flockton & Son’s contemporaneous work in Sheffield – the General Cemetery Church and Christ Church, Pitsmoor (both 1850), and St Matthew’s, Carver Street (1855) – but it is, as the cliché goes, small and perfectly formed, with a nave and chancel, a south aisle but no north aisle, a bell-tower and spire.

It was listed Grade II in 1973 and made redundant in 1979.  At first it was converted as a gymnasium for the Sheffield School of Gymnastics but then fell into neglect.

It was rescued by Anneka Rice’s TV programme, Challenge Anneka, broadcast on August 27th 1995 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9vZ1FI6Mwc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gGPhlmeY5s] as a circus school for Greentop Circus [http://www.greentop.org].

Apart from a shortage of storage-space, the interior is ideal for its present purpose.  The trapeze rig sits comfortably on the load-bearing walls of the nave;  there is ample height and floor-area and cramped but well-organised office-space in the west gallery, accessible by an intriguing spiral staircase in the tower.

Greentop is an arts education charity which provides, alongside training facilities for professional performers, school workshops and team-building for adults as part of its mission “to use contemporary circus skills to enhance people’s lives and inspire positive change”.

When I met a committee of the Church Commissioners to discuss the proposal to demolish St Cecilia’s, I was asked if there weren’t already enough community facilities on the Parson Cross estate.  I replied that if the existing six buildings were sufficient support for the local community, the area would not figure so high on indices of deprivation.

Greentop’s value to the local Firvale community is incalculable.  Some of the young people who have become involved are from the local Roma community, who have had a famously bad press recently:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10452130/Roma-in-Sheffield-When-it-goes-off-it-will-be-like-an-atom-bomb-here.html.

And without Greentop, the consecrated churchyard of St Thomas would contain only graves and a wreck or an empty space.

Gothic New York: Riverside Church

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Riverside Church, New York City

Riverside Church, New York City

On Riverside Drive overlooking the River Hudson is a great twentieth-century Gothic church of surprising proportions, the Baptist Riverside Church, largely financed by John D Rockefeller Jnr, and opened in 1929 to the designs of Allen, Pelten & Collens.

Especially when seen from the river, the huge tower, 392 feet high, dominates the church, which is itself a hundred feet high and 215 feet long.

The tower is in fact a 22-storey office building for the church administration, surmounted by a 72-bell carillon which – until 9/11 – visitors could inspect on their way to view the panorama from the top of the tower, from where the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan dot the horizon.

Riverside Church is proud of its stained glass and sculpture.  It has two Epsteins, the bronze ‘Madonna and Child’ (1927) and the gilded mould of the cast ‘Christ in Majesty’ at Llandaff Cathedral, Wales.

From the outset of its ministry, started by Rev Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), Riverside Church has been a springboard for all kinds of social intervention, and has provided a pulpit for a dazzling array of speakers, from Martin Luther King to Nelson Mandela, Jesse Jackson to Desmond Tutu, and Fidel Castro to Bill Clinton.

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

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