Category Archives: Demolished Sheffield

Goodbye St Hilda’s

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

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (August 31st 2013)

At the belated start of the belated campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I knew a good deal less about the byzantine workings of the Church Commissioners than I now do.

As the scaffolding goes up to begin destroying St Hilda’s, I’ve learned that to develop the land on which an Anglican church has stood requires unusual tenacity.

The conditions of sale demand that a prospective purchaser has a practical business plan and planning permission for the proposed development.

Planning permission involves a significant amount of expensive professional support.

Then, I’ve discovered, the prospective purchaser has to demolish the church building before they can purchase it.

Clearly, this requires nerves of steel and a great deal of faith, because it can cost close on a six-figure sum even to create an empty site.

I hope whatever goes up in place of St Hilda’s looks at least as good.

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.

Parson Cross

St Cecilia's Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield

St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (2013)

The huge Parson Cross municipal housing-estate on the north side of Sheffield dates only from the 1930s, though the place-name – written as “Parson’s Crosse Lane” – goes back at least to 1637.

There are, inevitably, lots of jokes about grumpy clergy.

Because the adjacent Shiregreen community missed out on opportunities to intervene in the plan to demolish the redundant church of St Hilda, I’ve since kept an eye on the disused church of St Cecilia, Parson Cross.

Not far off £400,000 was apparently spent on upgrading St Cecilia’s undercroft as a youth club as recently as the Millennium.  Yet demolition has been on the cards since at least 2010.

Early in August I responded to the Church Commissioners’ pianissimo advertisement of a drop-in meeting to discuss the proposed scheme to demolish.

The local residents who turned up vehemently opposed the destruction of St Cecilia’s, though none of them were members of the final congregation of ten that moved out in 2011.

People care deeply about their local parish church even if they don’t darken its doors from one year’s end to the next.  The place where their families were baptised, married and taken for their funerals means a great deal.

It’s strange that clergy and active church members have such difficulty attracting new members.

The process of disposing of redundant church buildings is convoluted.  The building is vested in the incumbent, and is the responsibility of the parishioners.  When the parish can no longer maintain the building, a divided responsibility between the diocese and the Church Commissioners triggers a byzantine legal process with little scope for the secular community to intervene.

It all looks underhand, and it makes local people impotently angry.

A diocesan document of 2010 which I’ve quoted in a previous blog-article about St Cecilia’s declared, “The Church building has reached the end of its life.”

Conversely, the Church of England Church Buildings Council in 2011 advised, “The problems are superficial, although investment would be required to rectify them.”

The Statutory Advisory Committee of the Church Buildings Council concluded a few months later that demolition was ill-advised because of the “low cost of essential repair and [the] potential for the cost of long-term repairs to be (part) absorbed into the cost of conversion”.

Yet a Scheme, as it’s called, for demolition is under way.

I wanted to know why demolition was presented as the only option, and I was told that demolition has to be written into Pastoral Schemes in case it may become necessary, but an acceptable scheme to retain the building, backed by planning permission and a credible business plan, would be preferred.

I’d love to see the people of Parson Cross put together a credible proposal for re-use, but to give them a fair chance, they should have been alerted at least three years ago.

Whose campus?

Jessop Hospital for Women, Sheffield:   Edwardian Wing (May 5th 2013)

Jessop Hospital for Women, Sheffield: Edwardian Wing (May 5th 2013)

Thomas Jessop (1804-1887) was a Sheffield steelmaker whose wealth took him from his birthplace on Blast Lane by the canal to the opulent Endcliffe Grange to the west of the town.  He served as both Mayor and Master Cutler, the two leading roles in the borough, in 1863.

His greatest benefaction to Sheffield was the Jessop Hospital for Women, a 57-bed facility, designed by the local architect John Dodsley Webster, which cost £26,000 when it opened in 1878.

An Edwardian extension, also by J D Webster, trebled the capacity in 1902, and an unremarkable new wing was added in 1939-40.

The whole hospital was replaced by a women’s wing in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in 2001:  http://www.sth.nhs.uk/our-hospitals/jessop-wing.

Sheffield University took over the site in 2007, demolished most of the peripheral buildings [http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/image_galleries/jessops_hospital_old_gallery.shtml?1] and carefully restored Webster’s original wing as a base for the Department of Music, which opened in 2009:  http://www.shef.ac.uk/music/about.

The University then proposed to demolish the Grade-II listed Edwardian wing to replace it with an arrogantly modern £81-million New Engineering Building, and caused uproar.

The Director of Estates & Facilities Management, Mr Keith Lilley, told the Sheffield Telegraph (April 22nd 2013), “Having a new building across the whole site would allow us to provide around five per cent more space and cost 10% less per square metre.  A totally new building would create 19,600 square metres of space whereas incorporating the hospital wing would provide 17,300 square metres.”

Sheffield City Council chose to support demolition http://postcodegazette.com/news/9002814177/demolition-of-listed-edwardian-wing-at-jessop-hospital-gets-go-ahead-AT-sheffield-former-jessop-hospital-for-women, ignoring the recommendations of their own planning team:  “The proposals have
serious implications and constitute poor design and should therefore be refused
in accordance with the National Planning Policy Framework.”

Specifically, the principal planning officer supported the 1902 block for its “positive townscape value”, and described the New Engineering Building as an “ungainly big box with an overly-complex external envelope that has no relationship with its setting”.

In bean-counting terms the argument has weight, but RMJM Architects’ showy cube cannot compare with Webster’s elegant building.

Moreover, there is a vital legal issue at stake.  Conservationists are deeply angry that listed-building legislation is being disregarded.

The Ancient Monuments Society, the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings and the Victorian Society [http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/university-demolition-plan-flawed-and-unfair] each condemned the decision, and the Hallamshire Historic Buildings Society declared this was simply “the easy way out” and “a dangerous precedent”.

Private Eye (March 22nd-April 4th 2013) described the University’s plans as “gratuitously destructive and wasteful”.

A request to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, to review the planning application was turned down.

SAVE Britain’s Heritage mounted a legal challenge, believing that the City Council “relies on an unsatisfactory interpretation” the new National Planning Policy Framework [http://www.savebritainsheritage.org/docs/articles/Jessops%20Hospital%20press%20release%20March%2013%20FINAL.pdf] and the social media buzzed:  https://www.facebook.com/oldjessophospital.

The challenged failed, and the Edwardian Wing was demolished in the late summer of 2013.

It was only one building, but the need to preserve it was hugely significant.  Why should a university, of all things, dump on the city a jazzed-up vanity building to gain 5% extra space in place of a polite, well-built, valuable piece of townscape?

No use for St Cecilia’s

St Cecilia's Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield

St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (2013)

As a result of last winter’s campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, I became intrigued by the history of inter-war churches in north Sheffield, built at the instigation of the first Bishop of Sheffield, Rt Rev Leonard Hedley Burrows (1857-1940;  bishop 1914-1939), in order to serve the housing-estates that mushroomed on what had previously been open countryside.

It seems that Bishop Burrows enlisted the Society of the Sacred Mission, the “Kelham Fathers”, to staff up to six churches as they were built.  The Kelham Fathers made a point of recruiting non-graduates to the ministry, and their practice was highly Anglo-Catholic.  The bishop and the director of the SSM must have thought this the most suitable approach for ministry to aspirant Sheffield working people transplanted from the slums to the splendid new council estates.

One of these new parishes was served by St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, built in 1939 to the designs of a little-known architect, Kenneth B Mackenzie (1891-1977) of Bibury, Gloucestershire.  How he came by the commission is a mystery:  he built hardly any major buildings and no other churches.

Yet St Cecilia’s is an interestingly rectilinear take on the form of the traditional gothic parish church, built of stone and set in a tight close of council houses.  It has a tower, and at the east end no window but a blank wall.

The congregation moved out of the church in 2011 because of “numerous issues with the building – failure of heating system, life-expired roofs and electrical installation to name but a few”, and the parishioners now worship in the practical but unlovely little mission church of St Bernard of Clairvaux, Southey Hill.

This move follows the direction indicated by a 2010 diocesan document, ‘Task & Tools:  Bishop’s commission to review ministry and mission in the North Sheffield estates’, which wrote off St Cecilia’s in a stark paragraph:

We believe that the decision on redundancy is right and should stand.  The Church building has reached the end of its life.  We also believe that demolition is the right course of action.  And we also believe that this should proceed swiftly – with the Church’s procedures for demolition being made to deliver that outcome.  Delay neither serves the mission of the Church nor heals the hearts of the congregation and its priest.

So that’s that, then.  Or is it?  The building may have reached the end of its life as a church, but it appears to be physically secure, and could stand for years not doing anything, not earning its keep.

I wonder about this determined ditching of substantial buildings.  All the mainstream Christian denominations are lumbered with expensive structures, many of which they cannot use.  Yet in such churches as St Cecilia’s there is financial capital, quality material, environmental energy and community potential that once discarded can never be recovered.

No use for St Hilda’s

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

It’s a year now since one of my neighbours started up a campaign – seven years too late – to raise awareness of the intended demolition of St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen after I’d raised an alert following a news item in the Ancient Monuments Society Newsletter.

Approximately 350 people signed the campaign petition, few of whom had probably set foot in the building for years, if ever, but all of whom didn’t want to see it go, whether they valued it as a landmark, a piece of the local heritage, or somewhere with which they had associations through baptism, marriage or other family connections.

The campaign generated more heat than light, because the Diocese and the Church Commissioners declared that they had followed all the necessary protocols to consult the local community, which appeared to amount to sticking an A4-size notice on the church door for six weeks, and were on the point of selling the building to a developer.

Months later, the identity of the developer remains a mystery and the building still stands.

It’s easy to sympathise with the church position:  Archdeacon Martyn Snow has pointed out that “…within a two mile radius of St Hilda’s we have six other church buildings all of which I would regard as ‘at risk’ ie the current congregations are struggling to pay for the upkeep of the buildings and if nothing changes in the next 5-10 years they may all face closure”.

Yet if the St Hilda’s building had been properly secured in the first place it would now be in better condition, and more likely to recoup the capital invested in it.

One very good way to send an unwanted building into decline is to leave half the windows unprotected so that the local ne’er-do-wells lob bricks at the glass and let the birds and the weather in.

And, ironically, if the fabric had been protected the members of the community who didn’t attend church and weren’t aware it was declared redundant in 2007 might have found a way to take it off the Church’s hands.

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.

Ritz in bits

Former Ritz Cinema, Parson Cross, Sheffield (1988)

Former Ritz Cinema, Parson Cross, Sheffield (1988)

Sitting innocuously in the midst of Parson Cross, Sheffield’s largest housing estate, the former Ritz Cinema, an Art Deco masterpiece, stood unknown, neglected and without a purpose until it was demolished at the end of January 2013.

It was built in 1937 on the site of Toad Hole Farm to serve a brand-new community.  The Parson Cross council estate covered the green fields with well-appointed houses for fortunate working-class families who had previously struggled with inadequate housing in the Victorian inner city.

The Ritz was designed by the well-reputed Sheffield architectural practice Hadfield & Cawkwell, with a restrained brick exterior and a sensational art deco auditorium which looked for all the world like the inside of a typewriter.

In its early days the Ritz was almost the only entertainment facility, apart from pubs and working-men’s clubs, on the estate.  There is a wartime photograph of the doorman, Mr Bilton, standing alongside a “House Full” sign at five to eight in the evening.

Between 1962 and 1966 the Ritz gradually went over to bingo, and was for many years run as an independent operation by Mr David Chapman.  He once told me that his business rested on being the only place in Parson Cross that ladies could go for entertainment without their husbands.

When I ran a Sheffield Cinema Society visit to the Ritz Bingo Club in 1988 the operating box (or projection room, to those of us who don’t belong to the industry) was intact.  Apparently the deeds of the building included a covenant requiring it to remain capable of reverting to cinema use.

Bingo finally ended at the Ritz sometime soon after 2001, after which it stood empty and became vandalised.

The last record of its condition that I can find is an urban explorer’s report from 2009 at Report – – The Ritz Cinema – Sheffield – 28/12/09 | Theatres and Cinemas | 28DaysLater.co.uk   The projectors were still in place, but trashed.

The Ritz deserved a much better fate.  It was a victim, not only of economic forces, but of the ungenerous and uninformed process of listing twentieth-century buildings in Sheffield.

Sometimes it seems as if listing is a process of creating rarities rather than protecting the historic-buildings stock for future evaluation and resuscitation.

It was eventually demolished in January 2013.

The Ritz Cinema, Parson Cross is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

“Sheffield’s perfection cinema”

Former Capitol Cinema, Sheffield Lane Top, Sheffield (1985)

Former Capitol Cinema, Sheffield Lane Top, Sheffield (1985)

When my mate Richard and I have our regular weekday evening putting the world to rights in whichever local pub is not having karaoke or a quiz night, towards the end of the night we phone our ETA to Lee or Jamie, fish-friers of distinction, and go to the Norwood Fish Bar, 411 Herries Road (0114-242-4127) for our supper, freshly cooked and timed to perfection.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s Lee or Jamie on duty:  the food is invariably top quality.

The Norwood Fish Bar is a shop-unit in an utterly unremarkable block that has been a Tesco supermarket since the early 1970s.  Before that, the site was the Forum Cinema, Southey Green, one of a series of huge 1930s cinemas built on Sheffield’s then new northern council estates.

(Someone on the council was clearly a lover of literature.  There are roads named after Chaucer, Wordsworth, Keats and so on.  Sheffield folk, as is their habit, choose to pronounce “Southey” to rhyme with “mouthy”, just as when a pub or street is named “Arundel” – after the home of the city’s ground-landlord, the Duke of Norfolk,– it’s always accented on the second, not the first syllable.)

The Forum was built by and for the Sheffield construction company M J Gleeson Ltd, who constructed the surrounding houses and appear to have had some kind of deal to build the adjacent shops as well as the cinema.

The architect was George Coles (1884-1963), a specialist cinema designer best known in London and the south-east for the Gaumont State, Kilburn, and a series of Odeons including the Odeon, Muswell Hill.

The Forum opened on September 17th 1938 and was closed on May 31st 1969.  It’s illustrated at http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/25709.

A couple of miles away, its sister cinema, originally the Capitol, Sheffield Lane Top, also by George Coles and built for M J Gleeson, survives as a carpet showroom.

The Capitol was due to open the week the Second World War broke out, so it stayed closed under the national ban on gatherings for entertainment until September 18th 1939, when it opened with Angels with Dirty Faces, starring James Cagney.

The opening-day description in the Sheffield Star refers to the cream faience dressing highlighting the brick exterior and the tubes of red and green neon on the canopy and the tower fin which inevitably remained switched off until 1945.

The Capitol subsequently became the Essoldo in 1950 and ultimately the Vogue in 1972, by which time it was one of only three remaining suburban cinemas in Sheffield.  It closed on October 4th 1975.

Its interior was understated, neo-classical in style, with alcoves and statues only recently concealed behind timber facing.

Even though the tower fin has been reduced in height, presumably for structural reasons and the marquee dismantled [https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=4786], it’s a more attractive structure than the architecturally illiterate 21st-century block of flats that has been built alongside.

It’s unlisted, and the interior décor that might justify listing is unrecognised.

The Capitol appears still to earn its keep and is for the moment in safe hands.

When it changes hands, however, a new owner might not recognise that they’ve acquired a building of some distinction by a nationally reputed architect.

Outside the box

St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

Photo:  Midlands Churchcrawler

I didn’t realise when I first posted an article about St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield how many of my neighbours I would stir up.

A local resident started a website to campaign for the future of the building – http://sthildas.webs.com/:  the associated petition attracted over three hundred signatures, most of them local.

I did an interview on BBC Radio Sheffield and an article has appeared in the Sheffield Star newspaper.

Local people woke up to the probability that a distinguished local landmark is about to disappear, and those individuals who have a past connection with St Hilda’s were particularly upset that it could disappear.

Since it finally closed for services in 2007, there seems to have been no mention or discussion of its fate in the local media, and I could find no proposal to replace it with any other kind of building.

Local politicians explained, politely but wearily, that the problem had been around for years, and say that they wouldn’t stand in the way of a practical, businesslike scheme to save the building.

Some national amenity societies were encouraging, but their brief is primarily to engage with English Heritage within their guidelines, which are interpreted to the disadvantage of St Hilda’s.

Members of the core group of supporters made contact with the Church Commissioners, who currently still owned the building.

One can’t blame the Church Commissioners for their disinclination to support a redundant building at the expense of the real work of the Church.  It’s a pity, nevertheless, that the situation wasn’t advertised a good deal more loudly in the streets that surround St Hilda’s.

Not everyone loved the building.  One commentator on a web forum said she thought it looked like a factory, which suggests a sanguine view of Sheffield’s industrial architecture.

In the Sheffield Local Studies Library I came across a run of parish magazines from the late 1980s which show exactly how a once thriving parish went downhill.

In April 1988, the month before the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration, the vicar, Father Roger Bellamy, enumerated the previous year’s rites of passage:   baptisms – 11;  confirmations – 0;  marriages – 0;  blessing of a marriage – 1;  funerals – 57.  He noted that fund-raising was “not a great success”.

At the end of 1988 he estimated the active membership of the parish at 42, and expected around ten of those to be “lost”, through age or migration, over the following year.

At the start of 1990 he commented:  “We are facing the realities of our situation:  a small congregation, a largeish building and a remarkable indifference to us from the parish.”

It’s not so much the eleventh hour as after midnight for St Hilda’s, too late – as it turned out – for those of us who live on the spot and care about the building’s existence to audit whether there really were community and commercial needs that it could serve, and to identify any positive, practical proposals to present to the owners and the planners.

Praised with faint damns

St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

After I first expressed an interest in the threatened St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I was shown the Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report, from which I quoted in Church going, which recommended the building for listing.

I’ve now seen the latest English Heritage advice-report rejecting that recommendation.  The task of an English Heritage inspector is to evaluate the building in the context of its national significance, according to guidelines which are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/publications/docs/places_of_worship_final.pdf.  At the end of these guidelines (p 20) is a comment that “while all listed buildings are of national importance, local factors may sometimes be of significance”.

St Hilda’s failed the tests when it was last inspected in October 2011.  There’s more than a hint of de haut en bas about the inspector’s silky comments.

The architect, Leslie Moore, is described as a “junior partner” to his better-known father-in-law, which he would be, being the son-in-law.  The original design of 1922 had a “strong resemblance” to Temple Moore’s St Mary, Nunthorpe, but the rather different building of 1935-8 is “simplified down” – as if an imitation is preferable to an adaptation while still not quite good enough.

It’s described as a “plain rectangular box”, which it certainly isn’t, “old-fashioned for [its] date”, built of red engineering brick which is “common”, like most of inter-war Sheffield, and the interior, embellished by George Pace, is “austere”.  Ruth Harman and John Minnis clearly thought it merited an illustration in their Pevsner Architectural Guide Sheffield (2004), p 188.

All this suggests that if St Hilda’s has aesthetic worth, it belongs on a local list in “recognition of its architectural or historical importance and its value to the local community” [see https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/urban-design–conservation/locallisting-.html].  Somehow, it seems not to have been considered so far as a candidate for the local list.

It’s not for me to assert that the national inspector and the local planners are wrong about St Hilda’s.  I think it’s a memorable, exciting, confident building that could once more be put to good use.  None of those epithets is necessarily a criterion for listing.

It would be peevish to point to listed buildings in the locality that might compare with St Hilda’s, but it is pertinent to point to some of the interesting, attractive and potentially useful structures that Sheffield has lost over the decades when listed-building legislation has existed to protect the built environment – the Britannia Music Hall, Huntsman’s Gardens Schools and the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe.

While St Hilda’s stands, there’s a chance of saving it – and it’s worth saving, whether it’s worth listing or not.

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.

Church going

St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield:  interior view towards liturgical east (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield: interior view towards liturgical east (December 2011)

Photo:  Midlands Churchcrawler

I’ve learned more about the plight of St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield as a result of my earlier article.

It seems that the verbal information on which Matthew Saunders, Secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, based his report in the recent Newsletter was perhaps over-dramatic.

Recent images by an urban explorer show that though the building has indeed been repeatedly vandalised, the attempts at arson have not caused major damage, and that George Pace and Ron Sims’ screen and the eighteenth-century organ case from the bombed church of St James remain, battered but intact.

I sense that the vandals’ acrobatics on the roof could only have been motivated by a search for scrap:  since the roof itself is tiled, the most likely source of scrap metal would have been the organ pipes, if they remained in situ.

The Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report on the building describes it as “striking…very ambitious…for its setting…[with] considerable townscape value” and in conclusion commented, “A fine church by an architect whose work deserves to be re-evaluated, with a particularly good and dramatic…interior.”

It ends:  “The Council has previously voiced concern about the number of churches of this period being considered for redundancy, and thought this church of a quality comparable to many listed churches.”

A private individual has lodged an application for emergency listing with English Heritage, making a judgement that there remains enough about the building to justify listed-building protection.

I can understand entirely why the Church of England authorities are anxious to divest themselves of liability for a redundant structure.  They have enough work to do in their Christian mission.

However, I don’t see why that must involve destroying the local heritage.  I’ve yet to hear of any positive proposal to use the site in any new way.

St Hilda’s, prominent on its ridge about Firth Park, belongs to the locality.  It offers substantial, well-built space for local people’s social activities.

If it remains standing, someone in the future can find a worthwhile use for it.  Once it’s gone, it’s gone for ever.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

And with it would go a relatively economical opportunity to offer local people somewhere to congregate, which St Hilda’s was for decades before, during and after the Second World War. Philip Larkin, in his poem ‘Church going’ [The Less Deceived, 1955], asked – When churches will fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into…? “Rubble” was not the answer he was looking for.

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.