Category Archives: Sheffield’s Heritage

Sheffield’s surviving cinemas 1: Darnall Picture Palace

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Former Darnall Picture Palace, Staniforth Road, Sheffield

Former Darnall Picture Palace, Staniforth Road, Sheffield

I first explored the surviving cinema buildings in Sheffield for the South Yorkshire Group of the Victorian Society circa 1983.

I’ve been asked to give a presentation at Sheffield City Library, so I decided to do a further survey of what is left of the fifty-odd auditoria that were built in the city up to the start of the Second World War.

One of the most attractive survivals – well cared-for though not intact – is the former Darnall Picture Palace, designed by Walter Gerald Buck and opened in 1913. Because the Darnall Picture Palace isn’t really in Darnall, and there was also a Darnall Cinema, locals called it the Balfour, because it was on the corner of Balfour Road, and by 1931 the proprietors were using that name in their advertising.

After it closed in 1959 the building was used by Clarks of Retford for their dry-cleaning business, and it’s now a quirky carpet showroom, run by a family firm as Balfour Carpets: http://www.balfourcarpets.com.

The mock-medieval castellated exterior is a landmark on the main road, and the barrel-ceiling interior has particularly fine fibrous plasterwork.

The sides of the proscenium arch remain, with faint traces of gilding, though the top of the arch has disappeared.

There was no overhanging balcony, though in 1920 the auditorium was extended to provide a raised rear section. It’s difficult to discern among the rolls of carpets exactly how this was done.

Ryan Jackson, one of the owners, who showed me round, took me upstairs to the staff room where there remains one of the hatches of the projection suite, still in situ.

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.

Mark Firth’s monument

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Sheffield General Cemetery: Mark Firth monument

Sheffield General Cemetery: Mark Firth monument

Mark Firth (1819-1880) was a significant figure in the life of Victorian Sheffield.  His father had been head smelter of the long-established steel manufacturer Sanderson Brothers, but Mark and his brother Thomas Jnr set up their own works in 1842 and ten years later moved to Savile Street, where the Sheffield & Rotherham Railway entered the town along the flat flood-plain of the Don Valley.

Their Norfolk Works quickly built a reputation for building armaments:  indeed, a veritable arms race took place on Savile Street, as Sir John Brown’s Atlas Works next door developed armour plate to resist the Firth company’s shells.  Though John Brown & Co acquired a majority shareholding in Thomas Firth & Sons in 1902, the two companies operated independently until 1930 when they became Thomas Firth & John Brown, commonly known as Firth Brown Ltd.

Mark Firth and Sir John Brown were also domestic neighbours in Ranmoor, up on the western hills away from the smoke and dirt of Sheffield’s east end:  Mark Firth lived at Oakbrook (c1860) and Sir John lived next door at Endcliffe Hall (1863-5).

Mark Firth enlarged Oakbrook in 1875 when he entertained the Prince and Princess of Wales (latterly King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) on their visit to open the 36-acre Firth Park, his gift to the city at Page Hall, just over the hill from the Don Valley.

Mark Firth dominated civic life in the years before Sheffield became a city:  indeed, some of his munificence may have made civic status a possibility.  He served as Master Cutler in 1867 and Mayor in 1874.  As well as Firth Park his name is linked to Firth College, opened in 1879, which ultimately became Sheffield University, and the thirty-six Firth Almshouses at Hangingwater, near to his Ranmoor home.

A modest and devout member of the Methodist New Connexion, he retained his links with his working-class roots to the end of his life.  Travelling daily by carriage from Oakbrook back to the works on Savile Street, he lunched on pies cooked by his foreman’s wife.  He was at the Works when he suffered a fatal stroke.

When he died the whole of Sheffield shut up shop for the day, and the funeral procession from Oakbrook stretched two miles to his grave in the General Cemetery, where his monument is now restored and listed Grade II.

The Firth Almshouses continue to operate as a registered charity [http://www.sheffieldhelpyourself.org.uk/full_search_new.asp?group=17923], and Oakbrook has been part of Notre Dame High School since 1919:  http://www.notredame-high.org.uk/index.php/information/item/161-history-of-notre-dame.

The Sheffield General Cemetery features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Victorian Cemeteries’.  For further details, please click here.

Abbeydale unveiled

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Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

Since Phil Robins took ownership of the former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield, he’s tidied up the interior so that at last it’s possible to see the entire auditorium from the back of the stalls or the back of the balcony.  The stage remains a forest of scaffolding until the stage-tower roof is made weather-tight.

When the Sheffield Antiques Quarter Christmas Market took place at the Abbeydale I was asked to show people the auditorium, a privilege that gave me opportunity to learn more about the building.

Insurance restrictions meant that visitors were not allowed on the stage or in the circle, so I provided a PowerPoint sequence showing the angles that weren’t accessible.

Talking to people who visited the cinema regularly from the 1950s to the 1970s suggested that there were at least four colour schemes over the years:

  • pale and deep cream and gold from the opening in 1920
  • pale green and gold sometime up to the early 1950s when Cinemascope was introduced
  • white or cream until at least the end of the 1960s
  • the current blue, claret and cream by the beginning of the 1970s

There may have been other colour schemes that only a paint analysis will reveal:  planning documents indicate, for instance, that a major refurbishment took place in 1928 and Clifford Shaw, in Sheffield Cinemas (Sheffield Cinema Society/Tempus 2001) p 101, shows a monochrome image of a decorative scheme that dates from August 1949.

I’m told I was introduced on the PA system as the Abbeydale’s “resident historian”, which led a friend to enquire if I had a flat in the projection room.

He’d no reason to know that in the late 1970s there was a flat in the projection suite after A & F Drake Ltd took it over as an office-equipment showroom.  Later in the day I met a lady who had lived in the flat for a couple of years.

She said that her dad and his mate had spent a night in the auditorium seeking ghostly presences.  The only presence that appeared was her cat.

Oddly, even later in the afternoon a lady asked me about the psychic history of the Abbeydale.  I had to say I didn’t know there was one, but I was able to point her towards the only accredited haunted cinema, the Don on West Bar, which still exists.

People were reassured to know that Phil’s plan to use the Abbeydale as a climbing centre won’t damage the listed interior:  all the climbing installations will be free-standing.  Indeed, one climber, a regular visitor to Phil’s existing centre, The Edge [http://www.sheffieldclimbing.com], said he was looking forward to sitting in the circle with a cup of coffee watching other climbers.

Update:  I read in the Sheffield Cinema Society June 2014 newsletter that Phil Robins has changed his plans:  the climbing-centre project at the Abbeydale isn’t going ahead – indeed, Phil has closed his other climbing centre, The Edge,– and the snooker club has moved out of the Abbeydale’s former ballroom in the basement.  For the first time in its history the entire building is empty.

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 1839.

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.

Good news at the Abbeydale

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Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

I reported in July 2012 that the Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield had been bought by Phil Robins, the owner of The Edge [http://www.sheffieldclimbing.com/index.php], an indoor climbing centre near to Bramall Lane football ground.

Phil showed me round the Abbeydale last month and allowed me to photograph the improvements he’s so far made while making the building secure and weather-tight.

The two major changes he’s made are to lower the iron safety-curtain to its proper level, so that it can be seen in its entirety for the first time for many years, and to remove the partition that divided the balcony from the rest of the auditorium when the Abbeydale was used as an office-equipment showroom.

At present, therefore, it’s possible to see the entire auditorium space as it existed in the mid-1950s.  The only feature that is not original is the false proscenium that was inserted when Cinemascope was installed.  The sides of the narrower original 1920 classical-detailed proscenium are visible, but not the top which, according to the opening-night description in the Sheffield Independent, displayed “a chaste panel of Grecian figures on a background of pale blue”.

The original decorative scheme was pale and deep cream with gold;  the 1920s proscenium is now a faded pale green trimmed with gold, and the rest of the auditorium is a strident concoction of blue, claret and cream.  (The lighter colours now visible may, of course, be tempered with nicotine.)

Phil intends to restore the interior space as far as possible to its original state, and to install free-standing climbing equipment which will not affect the listed decorative features.

Unintended consequences

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St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (August 29th 2013)St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (August 29th 2013)

I remarked in an earlier blog-article that I couldn’t understand how the Gloucestershire architect Kenneth B Mackenzie got the commission to build St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield in the late 1930s.

He certainly had no previous experience of designing churches, though he was apparently a sensitive restorer of existing church buildings in the Diocese of Gloucester.

St Cecilia’s is a fine essay in twentieth-century Gothic revival design.  Its stone exterior sits comfortably in its tight little close of council houses, now protected by trees that have matured over three-quarters of a century.  Its stubby little tower is in scale with its domestic surroundings, so that Chaucer Close has the feeling of a village green in the midst of the vast Parson Cross municipal housing estate.

Within, its concrete rendered walls, lit by the plain glass of the rectangular traceried windows, enclose a calm, expansive space, entered through a narthex into an aisled nave, with a sanctuary dominated not by an east window but by a reredos that was added in 1971.  Above the narthex is a west gallery filled with the magnificent case of the 1986 Cousans organ.

Kenneth Mackenzie was clearly fluent in the aesthetic language that the Anglo-Catholic congregation required, and left plenty of scope for additions and embellishments.

He was, like many architects of his generation, less adept at making his building easy to maintain.  He probably, in the late 1930s, assumed that future generations would give priority to preserving the building, in particular giving regular attention to the slate and asphalt roofs.

He couldn’t know that the electrical wiring installed in 1938 would still be in place seventy-five years later.

And he took it for granted that the stream that runs beneath the building would behave itself, which it hasn’t.  The presbytery, always known as the Priory, regularly flooded before it was demolished in 1994, and now that the church is disused the undercroft floor is heaving.

As a source close to the Church Commissioners remarked, the current difficulties with the building arise from defects of maintenance, not from its structural integrity.

It’s certainly untrue that St Cecilia’s Church has necessarily reached the end of its life.

But the unintended consequences of Kenneth Mackenzie’s decisions about structure and design have left a heavy legacy for anyone who contemplates bringing it back to any kind of use.

It seems that Kenneth Mackenzie was the nephew of Mr A R Heathcote, the then anonymous benefactor who paid for the building.