Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

Haven of quiet

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St Luke's International Hospital, Tokyo: Old Building

St Luke’s International Hospital, Tokyo: Old Building

When I visited Tokyo I found time to seek out St Andrew’s Cathedral and St Alban’s Church, two flourishing Japanese-Anglican churches with links to Bishop Samuel Heaslett (1875-1947), whose life story I’d discovered in the course of local-history research in Sheffield.

Relatively few buildings in central Tokyo predate the devastating bombing of 1945, but I read that the chapel of St Luke’s International Hospital was “one of the few original Anglican church structures in central Tokyo built prior to the Second World War”, and realised that it was located in Tsukiji, a couple of metro stops from where I was staying.

St Luke’s International Hospital was founded by an American physician and Episcopal missionary, Dr Rudolf Bolling Teusler (1876 – 1934), who began working in Tokyo in 1900.

His first hospital was ruined in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 and rebuilt to the designs of the Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond (1888-1976), who had trained with Cass Gilbert, designer of the Gothic Woolworth Building in Manhattan, and with Frank Lloyd Wright.  (After the war Antonin Raymond designed the timber church of St Alban, Shiba-koen, Tokyo.)

The replacement hospital of 1933, now the administration building of the modern St Luke’s, contains the chapel, completed in 1936.

The first floor landing leads into a high, Gothic Revival nave with a raised chancel and, above the entrance, an elaborate organ case, installed in 1988.  The walls are ashlar and there is geometrical stained glass in the east window.  There is a font, pulpit, lectern and choir stalls, and a lamp indicates the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament:  http://hospital.luke.ac.jp/eng/about/chapel/index.html.

Notices forbidding photography were everywhere.  I was content simply to sit there.  It was the only place in Tokyo where I felt any sense of connection with the past.  It also provides, in the words of the hospital website, “quiet space to find comfort and strength in difficult times”.

Another more modern chapel, Teusler Hall, in the adjacent wing has the same sense of peace.  Indeed, the entire place is capacious, unhurried and dignified.  Corridors are embellished with flower arrangements and pieces of art.  Staff and visitors move about decorously.

Christianity is a minority religion in Japan:  its adherents amount to less than 1% of the population.  Nevertheless, St Luke’s carries an effective mission that has grown directly from the work of missionaries a hundred years ago.

Bishop Heaslett

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St Alban's Church, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

St Alban’s Church, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

St Andrew's Cathedral, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

St Andrew’s Cathedral, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

When I explored the material in Sheffield Archives about the parish of St Cecilia, Parson Cross, I came upon a complete run of parish magazines from before the church was consecrated in 1939 until the mid-1950s.

The bulk of these magazines were edited by the first vicar, Fr (later Canon, and latterly Bishop) Richard Roseveare SSM (1902-1972), charting the sprouting of streets and houses on what had been farmland, the establishment of one of the biggest parishes in the Church of England with three churches and six or seven clergy, and the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath on the initial high hopes and ambitious plans for Parson Cross and St Cecilia’s.

He was a powerful figure, with a finger on the pulse of Sheffield working-class people – he formally opened the Parson Cross Hotel in June 1939 and ended up in the News of the World for his pains – and also a strict Anglo-Catholic who exhorted his parishioners to worship with due decorum.

St Cecilia’s parish started out with high-status helpers.  Lady Mabel Smith, the socialist daughter of the Earl Fitzwilliam, was a strong supporter until her death in 1951, and Mary Jane, Dowager Countess Ferrers, built a house on Halifax Road so she could help in the parish.

When Lady Ferrers died in 1944 her house became the home of Bishop Samuel Heaslett (1875-1947), who was Bishop of South Tokyo from 1921.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 he was given a very hard time by the Japanese authorities, who couldn’t grasp the idea that a Church of England was not a government agency, and after four months’ imprisonment and interrogation he was expelled from Japan.

Back in England Bishop Heaslett was offered a role as Assistant Bishop of Sheffield and came to Parson Cross in 1944.  He returned to Japan with his opposite number, the Bishop of North Tokyo, an American Episcopal Bishop, Charles S Reifsnider, to help the reformation of the Anglican church in Japan, Nippon Seikōkai, in May and June 1946.

The cathedral that Bishop Heaslett knew had been obliterated in the bombing of Tokyo towards the end of the war.  A wooden replacement building, St Alban’s Church, opened in 1956, designed by the Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond (1888-1976).  It stands alongside the more substantial St Andrew’s Cathedral (Hisao Kohyama 1996).

Samuel Heaslett is commemorated in Sheffield Cathedral by a wall-tablet, and he appears in the Te Deum window in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit.

From the pages of dusty old magazines, a memorial tablet, a face in a stained-glass window, fascinating stories emerge of lives lived in times that feel very different from the present day.

Timbertop

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Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (west aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (west aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (east aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (east aspect)

When I came to live in north Sheffield in 1973, the pleasantest place to go for a couple of pints in the evening was Timbertop on Shirecliffe Road at the top of a hill looking out across the Lower Don Valley, then still an expanse of smoking steelworks.

Timbertop was the most exciting and innovative of three 1960s public-house designs by the versatile Sheffield practice, Hadfield, Cawkwell & Davidson.  The others were the Jack in a box, Silkstone Road, Frecheville (1966) and The Domino, Egerton Street (1967, demolished).

Timbertop was commissioned by Bass Charrington (North) Ltd, built in 1969 and opened early in 1970.  It was an adventurous design, taking advantage of its sloping site five hundred feet above sea level.

The load-bearing brick walls support a timber structure, with a roof that presents as a valley on the entrance front and as a pyramid when seen from downhill.

All the service facilities were located in the basement, along with the tenant’s bedrooms;  the tenant’s living accommodation was, unusually, on the ground floor rather than above the public areas.

Customers had a choice of social areas spread over an open-plan split-level space, with a snug at ground level leading to a sunken lounge with a 16ft natural stone fireplace and a chimney breast reaching to the roof, and an upper-level gallery floor with a bar and snack-preparation room.

In harmony with the timber structure, the internal walls were lined with pine, and the ceilings were of cedar wood.

Another interior feature, unusual in Sheffield pubs at the time, was a waterfall.

The building was completed in nine and a half weeks.

The pub was opened by Alderman J W Sterland, who drew the first pint.  As chairman of the city licensing committee, he’d visited a few hostelries in his time and declared it “one of the finest pubs I have seen”.

In later years Timbertop gained an unsavoury reputation and was not the sort of place you’d go for a quiet pint.

There were repeated reports in the local press of “a significant number of incidents on the premises” involving “reports of assaults and drug usage and dealing”.

On one occasion the premises supervisor was attacked when he confronted a customer attempting to serve himself.  Further incidents included a stabbing, paramedics attending a customer who was comatose, assaults involving bottles and “a damaged vehicle with a ‘strong smell of cannabis’”.  The final straw must have come shortly after a shooting that led to a court case in September 2015.

Now the place stands empty, and the chances of it reopening as licensed premises are probably nil.  A car-wash operation occupies the car park.

It’s an exceptional building, in a part of Sheffield that has already lost – or may lose – some of the few landmark structures it ever had – such as the Ritz Cinema (Hadfield & Cawkwell 1937;  demolished 2013) and St Cecilia’s Parish Church (Kenneth B Mackenzie, 1939;  redundant).

Bridlington’s hidden Art Deco gem

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Regal Cinema, Bridlington

Regal Cinema, Bridlington

The Cinema Theatre Association is understandably unhappy that Historic England has dismissed the proposal to list the Regal Cinema, Bridlington, for its fine and almost intact Art Deco interior:  http://cinema-theatre.org.uk/our-campaigns/cinemas-at-risk/regal-bridlington-1.  Bingo has kept the place going since films ended in 1971.

Opened on July 28th 1938, the building was designed by Charles Edmund Wilford (1895-1988).  Though the exteriors were different, the interior of the Bridlington Regal was identical to the demolished Regal Cinema, Walton-on-Thames, built at the same date by the same architect for the same owner, Lou Morris.

The façade is dominated by a long, horizontal window which lighted the first-floor café, above four shop units on the ground floor.

The café and the auditorium, which originally seated 1,500 (or 1,489, or 1,355, depending on the source), are distinguished by the ornate Art Deco plasterwork of Eugene Mollo and Michael Egan.

The splay walls on either side of the proscenium figure a filigree pattern of foliage, originally illuminated by concealed lighting, and the geometric shapes at the end of the splays and on the ceiling are decorated with stylised foliage.  The original decorative scheme in silver and gilt was more subtle than the present livelier palette of the bingo club.

The stage is 43 feet wide and deep, with a suite of four dressing rooms, and there was a 3-manual, 6-rank Compton organ which was removed c1968.

The CTA’s Bulletin (January/February 2015) bristles with indignation over the “unclear and unreliable… subjective standard used to adjudge this building” and the “factual errors” in the Historic England rejection of the listing proposal.

Bridlington Borough Council has made a magnificent job of the Spa complex down the road from the Regal.  Let’s hope that imagination, diplomacy and judicious financial management will keep the Regal intact if and when bingo becomes unprofitable.

There is footage of Florence de Jong playing the Regal Compton organ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Dg3LNYGyw.

Spence in Sheffield: St Catherine of Siena, Richmond

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St Catherine of Siena Parish Church, Richmond, Sheffield

St Catherine of Siena Parish Church, Richmond, Sheffield

On the strength of his commission for St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue, Sheffield, Basil Spence was invited to design a parish church with an attached church hall for the parish of St Catherine of Siena, serving the eastern estates of Richmond and Woodthorpe.

This building was also financed by the compensation payments for bombed inner-city churches – of St Philip, Shalesmoor (1828, demolished 1952) and Christ Church, Attercliffe, (1826, demolished 1953).

The foundation stone was laid on April 11th 1959 and the church was consecrated by Bishop Leslie Hunter on December 5th the same year.

Like St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue, St Catherine’s is marked by a tower consisting of two brick pillars, surmounted by a cross, linked by a glazed sacristy corridor to a plain cavity-wall brick nave.

At St Catherine, however, the tower slabs are concave and the nave is lit by narrow slit windows and ends in a windowless semi-circular apse.

The roof consists of laminated timber beams, separated from the walls by a glazed clerestory and a concealed window that lights the sanctuary providing an atmosphere of well-lit privacy.

Basil Spence’s perspective of the proposed design, dated April 1957, shows the original intention to orientate the church north-south with the tower to the east.  The sequence of drawings indicates that in March or April 1958 the decision was taken to realign the church geographically, as well as liturgically, east-west, with the tower to the south.

A glazed screen at the back of the nave, with the organ mounted above the doorway, separates the nave from the community areas which are integral to the design and follow a pattern that Spence had set in designing three churches for the Diocese of Coventry in 1954.

Ronald Pope’s sculpture of St Catherine holding the burning heart before the crucified Christ was placed on the eastern face of the bell-tower and dedicated by Bishop Francis John Taylor on February 13th 1966.

The church was listed Grade II in 1997 for its “strongly sculptural design with a powerful presence”.

Spence in Sheffield: St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue

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St Paul’s Parish Church, Wordsworth Avenue, Sheffield

After Basil Spence (Sir Basil from 1960) won the competition to rebuild the bombed Coventry Cathedral in 1950 he became one of the architects to go to for parish church designs, particularly on new housing estates.

Bishop Gorton of Coventry invited Spence to design three new suburban churches, St Oswald, Tile Hill, St Chad, Wood End, Henley Green and St John the Divine, Willenhall (all three opened 1957);  in Leicester, Bishop Williams, explicitly on the recommendation of Neville Gorton, commissioned St Aidan’s, New Parks (1959);  in Sheffield, Spence designed two elegant modern parish churches on opposite sides of the city.

Partly funded by the compensation payments for two bombed churches, St James’ (1789) in the city centre and Emmanuel, Attercliffe (1882), St Paul’s, Wordsworth Avenue, opened in 1959, was built to serve the community that came to live in a post-war extension of the Parson Cross housing estate that Sheffield Corporation had laid out north-west of the city in the late 1930s.

Spence’s design has two conjoined elements.  What looks like a tower is actually two brck pillars surmounted by a cross, and the aisleless nave consists of two parallel brick side walls above which floats the shallow barrel-vault roof.  The double-glazed clerestories and the glass screen end walls bring light into the building:  they were also cheaper and quicker to construct.

Ove Arup & Partners designed the diaframe bracing of the roof reminiscent of Gothic vaulting and serving the same purpose.

The pews were designed by Basil Spence and made of agba, an African mahogany now endangered and in short supply.  The organ, bought from Mount Tabor Methodist Church, Hoyland, and installed in 1962, is mounted on the west gallery.

An African teak slatted screen behind the altar gives privacy to the congregation while making services apparent to the outside world.  As the church website remarks, the glazed ends “prevent the worship of the church being a secret from the community or the worshippers being unaware of what is going on in the area”.

Basil Spence gave the altar candlesticks of hammered iron, and the green appliqué altar frontal was made in 1958 by Beryl Dean (1911-2001) to the design of Anthony Blee, Basil Spence’s son-in-law.

The church silver includes a chalice and paten by the Sheffield silversmith Omar Ramsden (1873-1939).

The total cost was around £30,000.

The English Heritage Grade II* listing description describes St Paul’s as “an unusually transparent design and Spence’s best small churches”.

Museum Mile – the Guggenheim Museum

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Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Solomon R Guggenheim (1861-1949) was a younger son of the mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim (1828-1905) and the founder of the Yukon Gold Company. He collected modern art and displayed his paintings at his apartment at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, until the collection became so large that it grew into the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which opened in 1939.

In 1943 he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s only New York building, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum [http://www.guggenheim.org], which eventually opened in 1959 – after the deaths of both the founder and the architect – at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street in the midst of the city’s Museum Mile.

There it sits, looking as if it’s landed from outer space, a deliberate challenge to the rectilinear patterns of the streets and the buildings around it.

Frank Lloyd Wright would rather have built it elsewhere – not in New York City, which he disliked – and chose the Fifth Avenue site because of its proximity to Central Park.

The spiral shape reflects a nautilus shell, and the divisions of the display areas echo the membranes of citrus fruit.

Like most Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, it looks remarkable yet has turned out to be remarkably difficult to maintain, and it’s undergone a series of repairs and renovations.

Though its aesthetic appeal is a matter of taste, there is no denying the impact of this sensuous, swirling structure.

Its practicality can best be appreciated by taking the ovoid lift to the top and following the gently graded spiral ramp, which inevitably dictates the order of viewing exhibits, round and round the central space.

The peculiarities of its display-space have irritated some artists and, indeed, some curators. It’s impossible to hang a flat painting on a concave wall, and difficult to place a rectilinear canvas on a sloping floor.

Others regard it as an exceptional context for showing artworks. Indeed, one of its most memorable exhibitions, Frank Gehry’s The Art of the Motorcycle (1998), was built around an assemblage of 114 historic motor-bikes.

The Guggenheim’s eccentricities do not suit all types of art by any means, but the building is a consummate work of art in its own right.

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

Golders Green Crematorium

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Golders Green Crematorium, London

Golders Green Crematorium, London

Cremation became a legal and practical alternative to burial when the Cremation Society inaugurated their Woking Crematorium in 1885, but the practice remained expensive and practically difficult while Woking remained the only crematorium in the country.

Commitals remained in the low hundreds per annum, peaking at 301 in the year 1900. By the start of the new century crematoria had begun to appear in the north, in Manchester (1895), Glasgow (1895), Liverpool (1896) and Hull (1901).

The Cremation Society had attempted to find a site in London for some years before they bought a twelve-acre site at Hoop Lane, Golders Green, directly across the road from a recently opened Jewish cemetery.

Golders Green Crematorium opened in 1902, designed in red brick by Sir Ernest George (1839-1922) and Alfred Bowman Yeates (1867-1944). Not only was this the first crematorium in the metropolis, but it was the first anywhere in Britain designed by architects of national repute.

From the start its policy was secular – rites of any religion, and none, were and are acceptable – and the Lombardic Romanesque style was deliberately unecclesiastical. Furthermore, the garden layout designed by William Robinson (1838-1935) looked as little like a Victorian cemetery as possible.

The facility gained popularity, and its existence was influential in making cremation the preferred means of disposal in the UK. In 2013, 74% of funerals were cremations.

Cremation gradually became respectable, rather than radical. The first member of the royal family to be cremated was Princess Louise Margaret, Duchess of Connaught and Strathearn (1860-1917), Queen Victoria’s daughter-in-law. Her ashes were transported from Golders Green to the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore in an urn inside a conventional coffin.

After the actor Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) was cremated before burial in Westminster Abbey, the Dean and Chapter moved to a policy whereby burials in the Abbey had to be preceded by cremation to save space. The only exception is the Percy Dukes of Northumberland, who are still free to use their family vault in the Abbey for burial if they wish. A parallel rule was adopted by the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Reading the memorial plaques in the cloisters at Golders Green makes one wonder who wasn’t cremated there.

The most recent well-known funerals there have included John Inman (1935-2007), Michael Foot (1913-2010), Amy Winehouse (1983-2011), Peter O’Toole (1932-2013) and Doris Lessing (1919-2013).

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness 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.

Mrs Ronnie

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Polesden Lacey, Surrey: detail

Polesden Lacey, Surrey: detail

Polesden Lacey is one of the National Trust’s most popular country houses, an idyllic place to visit, rich in the atmosphere of the age of Edwardian entertaining, and a commemoration of a gifted hostess.

Margaret Greville was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Edinburgh brewer, William McEwan, and a boarding-house landlady, Helen Anderson.  Her parents married when she was twenty-one and, carefully screening her origins, she rose without trace in English society to become the valued confidante of three kings, Edward VII, George V and George VI.  (The Prince of Wales, briefly King Edward VIII, thought her a “bore”, which she seems to have regarded as no great loss.)

A vital step in her ascent was her loving, childless marriage to Ronald Greville. They commissioned Charles Mewès and Arthur Davis, the architects of the Ritz Hotel, to redesign Polesden Lacey in 1906 but Ronald Greville died two years later.

As “Mrs Ronnie”, she entertained at Polesden Lacey and in London, travelled the world, and seemed to know almost everyone of significance in English high society.

Siân Evans’ biography, entitled Mrs Ronnie:  the society hostess who collected kings (National Trust 2013) shows how Margaret Greville used her father’s wealth and her husband’s status to impress the highest in the land.

She endeared herself to King Edward VII while he was still Prince of Wales:  she provided varied, interesting company, the standard of luxury to which he was accustomed, and consummate discretion:  “I don’t follow people into their bedrooms,” she said.  “It’s what they do outside them that’s important.”

After her father’s death in 1913, recognising that she had no family member to whom she could bequeath her substantial wealth, she intimated to King George V and Queen Mary that she would leave her estate to one of their descendants, with a presumption that it should go to their second son, then known as Prince Albert.

This may indicate why the prince brought his bride to Polesden Lacey for part of their honeymoon in 1923:  the thought may have crossed their royal minds that one day all this would be theirs.

Mrs Ronnie lived until 1942, sitting through the Blitz in her penthouse at the Dorchester, teasing her friends who cowered in the basement.  She was buried in the garden at Polesden Lacey near to the house.

Her will revealed that she had left Polesden Lacey to the National Trust, and among her many bequests she willed “with all my loving thoughts all my jewels and jewellery” to Queen Elizabeth.  The Queen took this surprise philosophically, writing to the King, “I am not sure that this isn’t a very good idea because it is a very difficult place to keep up, terribly expensive I believe and needing a millionaire owner”.

Among many other bequests, large and small, Mrs Ronnie left £20,000 to Princess Margaret and £10,000 to Osbert Sitwell.

Her net estate amounted to £1,505,120 5s 10d.

By the tide of Humber

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Humber Bridge, viewed from Hessle, East Yorkshire

Humber Bridge, viewed from Hessle, East Yorkshire

There’s no such place as Humberside.  The name was a confection arising out of the 1974 reorganisation of local government.  The non-metropolitan county disappeared in a further reorganisation in 1996, though the name remains in use by the police and fire-and-rescue authorities, a BBC radio station and an airport in North Lincolnshire.

If Humberside had any reality, its expression would be the beautiful suspension bridge that connects East Yorkshire with North Lincolnshire between Hessle and Barton-on-Humber.

The Humber Bridge [http://www.humberbridge.co.uk] is the epitome of elegant engineering, designed by Freeman, Fox & Partners with R E Slater as architectural adviser.  Its design is based on the first Severn Bridge (Freeman, Fox & Partners, 1966) – itself a revolutionary advance on its predecessors, such as the Forth Road Bridge of 1964.

Long awaited, it was authorised in 1959 by an Act of Parliament that established a Humber Bridge Board with the power to build it but no power to raise finance.  Even after Harold Wilson notoriously pressured his transport minister, Barbara Castle, to give a go-ahead to influence the Hull North by-election in 1966, construction work only began in 1972, and the bridge opened to traffic in 1980.

Until then, road journeys between Grimsby and Cleethorpes and the city of Hull required a hundred-mile detour via Goole or crossing on the New Holland ferry.

The main span is 1,410 metres, and the total length is 2,220 metres.  The towers, reaching 160 metres above high water, are both vertical but not parallel to each other:  they splay outwards because of the curvature of the earth so that their tops are 36mm (1.4 inches) further apart than the bases.  They also bend inwards in storm conditions, so that in an 80mph wind the deck can move more than three metres at the centre of the main span.

The Humber Bridge was, until 1998, the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was superseded by the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan (1,991 metres, 6,532 feet).  In 2014 it remains the seventh longest in the world and the longest in Britain.

Later proposals to incorporate it into the route of an East Coast Motorway, effectively an extension of the M11, appear to date from a conference called by the then Humberside County Council in July 1988:  http://motorwayarchive.ihtservices.co.uk/en/motorways/regions/eastern-england/the-east-coast-motorway-feasibility-study.

The Humber Bridge has never come anywhere near to repaying its costs, so it remains a toll crossing.  You can walk across for free, and there are concessions for disabled drivers.

Motorcyclists were subject to tolls, which provoked a particularly entertaining protest in 2004 when they turned up in force, each carefully removing helmet and gloves before offering high-denomination notes to the toll-keepers.  The motorcycle toll was removed, in line with the Dartford and Severn crossings, in 2012.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber 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.