Category Archives: Survivals & Revivals: past views of English architecture

No expense spared 1: Liverpool 8 churches

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St Agnes' Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

St Agnes’ Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

A couple of years ago I spent a fascinating four days researching and photographing places of worship in suburban Liverpool, south of the city, to add to my ‘Liverpool’s Heritage’ lecture and study-day for NADFAS [the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies].

I found a whole collection of fabulous Victorian buildings, and met some particularly interesting people in the process.

One group of Anglican churches is the series founded by the Horsfall family over two generations.  Robert Horsfall commissioned the great Gothic Revival architect, George Edmund Street, to build St Margaret’s, Princes Road, in 1868, at least partly because the diocese was vehemently low church, and he wished to promote elaborate, Anglo-Catholic worship.  This magnificent building, sumptuously embellished with wall paintings and stained glass, much of it designed by Maddox & Pearce and Clayton & Bell, is much loved by the local community, but desperately short of funds.

Robert Horsfall may well have been provoked by the statement of his low-church younger brother George’s project to build Christ Church, Linnet Lane (1867-71), not far away.  This church, by William Culshaw and Henry Sumners, has an elaborately sculpted exterior and a much plainer, though costly interior.  Its peculiar gabled aisles are particularly difficult to keep watertight, and the parish apparently struggles financially.

Robert Horsfall’s son, Howard Douglas Horsfall (1856-1936), was responsible for St Agnes’, Ullet Road, opposite Sefton Park.  Designed by the architect of Truro Cathedral, John Loughborough Pearson, this large but outwardly modest brick church has a dramatic interior, like a miniature cathedral, rich in carvings, stained glass and alabaster.  Pearson’s aim, in his own words, was to design “what will bring people soonest to their knees”.

The controversies of the Victorian Church of England are difficult to grasp in an age when Anglicans fall out about female and gay priests and bishops.  The second vicar of St Margaret’s went to jail for contempt of court over a liturgical dispute with the first Bishop of Liverpool, J C Ryle.  There were serious fears that the consecration of St Agnes’ would be interrupted by “some disturbance” following “heated newspaper agitation”.  Within weeks of the opening, the first vicar of St Agnes was in disagreement with Bishop Ryle over “the illegal use of Eucharistic Lights, Wafer-Bread, the Mixed Chalice, the Agnus Dei and the hymn sung during Holy Communion” and waited twelve years before the bishop backed down.

All three of these superb buildings still house congregations, though the days of packed pews and arguments over ritual are long gone.  Rev Robert Gallagher, the former vicar of St Margaret’s, wryly observed, “the capital used for St Margaret’s beginnings came largely from Liverpool merchants’ involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade and down through grandparents’ bank accounts…an irony not lost on a parish that is now the heart of Liverpool’s black community.”

The Ship of Fools’ mystery worshipper describes the “pious gaiety” of St Agnes’ at http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2012/2330.html.

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.

Ladies with minds of their own

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Plas Newydd, Llangollen, Denbighshire

Plas Newydd, Llangollen, Denbighshire

Among the less likely celebrities to attend the ceremonial opening of the Pontcysyllte aqueduct in November 1805 were the Lady Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) and her companion Miss Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832), of Plas Newydd, legends within their own lifetimes as the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’.

This famous and eccentric pair of friends were both of Irish ancestry but from contrasting backgrounds:  Lady Eleanor’s family had lost the title Marquess of Ormonde because of their Catholic faith;  Sarah Ponsonby’s family were members of the Protestant Ascendancy.

Neither woman had a particularly happy youth.  When Lady Eleanor reached the age of 39 without showing any inclination to marry, her mother tried to pack her away in a French convent.  It seems likely that Sarah Ponsonby was propositioned by a married relative, Sir William Fownes.

Despite a sixteen-year gap in their respective ages, the two formed an intense friendship and resolved to elope.  Though at first they were brought back to their respective families, the ructions were such that they were eventually allowed to leave together, with an uncertain income of £300, and after touring Wales and the Marches for nearly two years they settled in Llangollen where they rented a cottage that they renamed Plas Newydd (‘New Hall’).

Tended by a housekeeper, Mary Caryll, they took up a life of deliberate seclusion which was interrupted at regular intervals by such illuminati as the poet Anna Seward, Harriet Bowdler, editor of the expurgated Shakespeare, the great potter Josiah Wedgwood, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium-Eater, and Sir Arthur Wellesley who in later life became the Duke of Wellington.

Not all visitors were made welcome – the ladies were not beyond hiding from unwanted guests – but they were partial to gifts of antique carved oak, and Plas Newydd to this day is encrusted with weird woodwork.

Even in those pre-Freudian times tongues wagged periodically, and the General Evening Post of July 24th 1790 carried an article entitled ‘Extraordinary Female Affection’ loaded with the innuendo of a modern red-top.  Harriet Bowdler, writing after their deaths in 1836, probably defined the relationship as it was lived:

True friendship is a divine and spiritual relation of minds, a union of souls, a marriage of hearts, a harmony of designs and affections, which being entered into by mutual consent, groweth up into the purest kindness and most endearing love, maintaining itself by the openest freedom, the warmest sympathy, and the closest secrecy.

Elizabeth Mavor wrote a delightful account of the Ladies’ lives, The Ladies of Llangollen:  a study in romantic friendship (Penguin 1973):  https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-ladies-of-llangollen/elizabeth-mavor/9780953956173.

Plas Newydd is a short walk out of Llangollen town centre:  it is administered by Denbighshire County Council [Plas Newydd, Llangollen | Denbighshire County Council].

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

Slaughterhouse Gothic 1

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Victoria Building, University of Liverpool

Victoria Building, University of Liverpool

The expression “red-brick university” stems from the great Victorian Liverpool-born Quaker architect, Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), and his love for terra-cotta, glazed moulded brick, with which it is possible to contrive elaborate effects without the great expense of masons and masonry.

The term was actually coined by Liverpool University’s Professor of Hispanic Studies, Edgar Allison Peers (1891-1952) in his polemic, Red Brick University, published under the pseudonym Bruce Truscot in 1943.

Waterhouse is responsible for, among much else, Manchester Town Hall, the Refuge Assurance Building in Manchester that is now the Principal Hotel, the Natural History Museum, South Kensington and a series of unmistakable office-buildings for the Prudential Assurance Company.  His predilection for terra-cotta led his architectural contemporaries sarcastically to label his work “slaughterhouse Gothic”.

His influence on the competition for the Victoria Law Courts, Birmingham, which were eventually built by Aston Webb & Ingress Bell, undoubtedly encouraged Birmingham to become “terracotta city” in the Edwardian period.

In his native Liverpool, Waterhouse built (in stone) the former North Western Hotel in front of Lime Street Station, and the iconic Victoria Building of Liverpool University (1892).  This was conceived as part of an 1880s federation of University College, Liverpool, Owens College in Manchester and the Yorkshire College in Leeds, which split up when first Liverpool and then Leeds gained independent university status in 1903 and 1904.

Many of the architectural interesting parts of the Victoria Building are now open to the public as the Victoria Gallery & Museum, and the interior is an eye-opening.  Rather than the lavatorial reds that one might expect, Waterhouse used an interesting palette of buff and pale green faience.  Staircases weave through the building, supplemented by an ingeniously inserted modern lift.  The Tate Hall, formerly the library funded by the great sugar baron, has a spectacular timber roof.

It’s well worth a visit.  Admission is free.  The displays feature aspects of the University’s work since its foundation in 1887.  And it’s a welcome addition to Liverpool’s superb range of places to have morning coffee or afternoon tea. See http://www.liv.ac.uk/vgm.

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.

Security-minded aristocrat

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Peckforton Castle, Cheshire

Peckforton Castle, Cheshire

John, 1st Baron Tollemache (1805-1890) was not a figure to argue with.  Robust, traditional, solid character, full of vigour and strength, he lived life according to his own principles and died at the age of 85 from the effects of driving his trap through wintry weather.

He commissioned Anthony Salvin, one of the most versatile of Victorian architects, to build Peckforton Castle on his 26,000-acre Cheshire estate in the form of a fully equipped Edwardian castle (Edward I, that is,) complete with drawbridge and battlements, on top of a steep hill looking across to the genuinely medieval ruin of Beeston Castle on the adjacent hill.

If any Victorian architect could design a full-size thirteenth-century castle to be habitable by large-as-life nineteenth-century occupants, Salvin could.  Tough, gloomy, irredeemably masculine, the brand-new house had every modern convenience of its day, though some of them were in unlikely places.  All the spaces a Victorian aristocrat would expect in his house were provided, such as a billiard room, a library and a drawing room.  The main staircase is pentagonal.  The floor of the octagonal dining room sits on the central pillar of the annular wine cellar below.  There is also a long gallery, which is technically neither a medieval nor a Victorian feature.

Why did Lord Tollemache insist that his residence should be defensible against a thirteenth-century army?  Its dates are significant – 1845-50.  It seems that the baron, characteristically generous to his own tenants, feared an invasion of the Cheshire plain from the starving workers of the Lancashire cotton towns.  An Edwardian castle, quite as sturdy as Caernarfon or Conwy, could protect not only his family and his household, but also his tenants and, if necessary, their livestock.

The threat was virtually over by the time the place was finished.  But that didn’t make it any less real at the time it was started.

It seems unlikely that anyone other Lord Tollemache himself could have lived in the Castle with enthusiasm.  Descriptions of the house in the twentieth century suggest a plaintive attempt to soften and warm the interiors.  The Tollemache family never returned after the Second World War, and the entire contents were auctioned in 1953.

For years the place struggled to find a use:  it was invaluable as a film set;  at one point it was a venue for live-action role-playing games.  Since the early 1990s it has operated as a hotel.  It’s a particularly spectacular place to get married.

The Peckforton Castle website is at http://www.peckfortoncastle.co.uk.  Beeston Castle is in the care of English Heritage [http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/beeston-castle-and-woodland-park].  It’s a particularly steep climb to the top of the motte.  There is a charge for car parking.

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