Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

Prague without a guide-book: the Crowne Plaza Hotel

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Crowne Plaza Hotel, Prague, Czech Republic

Crowne Plaza Hotel, Prague, Czech Republic

Yet another of my wanderings around Prague by tram took me on route 20 to Podbab, where I found an astonishing Crowne Plaza Hotel which I considered couldn’t possibly have been built as a hotel.

Sure enough, it turns out to be a defence-ministry building, the creation of the very powerful Stalinist Minister of Defence, Alexej Čepička (1910-1990) who, if his Wikipedia entry is to be believed [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexej_%C4%8Cepi%C4%8Dka], came straight from Central Casting.

According to Wikipedia, its nuclear shelter for 600 people is now the staff cloakroom.

Though the hotel website [http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/crowneplaza/hotels/us/en/prague/prgcs/hoteldetail?cm_mmc=mdpr-_-GoogleMapsCZ-_-cp-_-prgcs] describes its architecture as Art Deco, it was actually constructed in 1952-4.

A Czech website describes the style as “an original combination of the architecture of Socialist Reali known as Sorela, and art-deco of the American type, completed by Czech artists and craftsmen”:  http://www.visitprague.cz/en/hotels/crowne-plaza-hotel-prague.html.

The room-rates aren’t at all bad:  I could stay there.

 

Exploring Sydney: Museum of Sydney

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Museum of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Museum of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

If you arrive in Sydney and want to understand its history, the best place to start is the Museum of Sydney, a modern complex at the base of a high-rise block immediately south of Circular Quay, designed by Richard Johnson of Denton Corker Marshall and opened in 1995.

It stands on the site of the original Government House, built in 1788 for Governor Arthur Phillip and occupied until 1846.  Some of the foundations and the outline of the building are visible, and within there’s a detailed model and a recreation of part of the façade.

On the forecourt of the Museum is a haunting sculpture by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley entitled ‘Edge of Trees’, marking the spot where the Gadigal natives must have observed the arrival of the First Fleet of colonists from England.

The three floors of exhibition space tell the story of the early settlers and their relationship with the indigenous population.  There are models of the eleven ships of the First Fleet, and displays about the nine Governors who resided on the site, other important figures in the early history of the city, and a video montage Eora [“people”], by Aboriginal filmmaker Michael Riley, highlighting the life of Sydney people of indigenous descent back to the time of their dreaming.

Details of visiting times, and an online guidebook, are at http://www.hht.net.au/museums/mos.

 

Midland Hotel, Morecambe

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Midland Hotel, Morecambe, Lancashire

Midland Hotel, Morecambe, Lancashire

The Midland Hotel, Morecambe (1933) – an unlikely building in an unlikely setting – is one of the finest examples of Streamline Moderne (late Art Deco) architecture in Britain.  Its heyday lasted barely six years, until the outbreak of war.  After that, it became progressively difficult to operate, until it was rescued, sumptuously renovated and reopened in June 2008 by the developer Urban Splash.

Its railway-owned predecessor dated back to 1848, to the very beginnings of the resort that became Morecambe, and the Promenade Station was constructed in 1907 specifically to bring trains as close as possible to the hotel’s front door.

By the early 1930s the old hotel was badly out of date, and in January 1932 the directors of the London Midland & Scottish Railway approved plans to replace the 1848 building with “a building of international quality in the modern style”, designed by Oliver Hill (1887-1968) on a budget of slightly less than £72,000.  The new building rose from the lawn of the old hotel, which was subsequently demolished.

Oliver Hill was at the height of his career in the 1930s:  after starting out designing picturesque Arts & Crafts cottages, he embraced the visual potential of the Moderne style, of which his best designs, in addition to the Morecambe Midland Hotel, are the partially-built Frinton Park Estate in Essex (1934-6) and the house Landfall (1938), near Poole in Dorset.

His attributes were an eye for unifying architecture with decoration, and his adventurous use of materials such as concrete, chrome and vitrolite.  The result was a building that, in the words of the Architectural Review, “rises from the sea like a great white ship, gracefully curved”.

Hill’s brief for the Midland Hotel enabled him to recruit the best available decorative artists while maintaining full control of the building’s aesthetic programme.

The sculptor and designer Eric Gill (1882-1940) designed and carved for the façade two Portland stone seahorses in the form of the celebrated Morecambe Bay shrimps, a ten-foot Neptune and Triton medallion above the central staircase, a bas-relief, Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa, and a map of North West England, painted in oil by his son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier.

In the circular café were originally murals by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) of the seaside by day and by night.  These quickly deteriorated, and one mural was reconstructed by London Weekend Television set-designers for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot in 1989.

The floor of the entrance hall was embellished with a mosaic seahorse and circular, wave-patterned hand-knotted rugs by Marion Dorn (1896-1964), who also worked on the Berkeley, Clarides and Savoy Hotels in London and the Cunard liner Queen Mary.

The new hotel opened on Wednesday July 12th 1933, and quickly attracted celebrities in search of luxury and privacy within easy reach of London, performers from the Winter Gardens and other theatres, and Yorkshire businessmen who commuted by railway club carriage to Leeds or Bradford through the summer months.

It’s interesting that the LMS Railway thought it worthwhile to cater for the most affluent members of British society in the north of England.  After the war and nationalisation the British Transport Commission could hardly get rid of it fast enough.

There are images of the Midland Hotel as it stood before Urban Splash took it on at http://www.abandoned-britain.com/PP/midlandhotel/1.htm.

The Midland Hotel is now operated by English Lakes:  http://englishlakes.co.uk/hotels/lancashire-hotels/the-midland-hotel-morecambe.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  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.

Rotunda

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The Rotunda, Birmingham (1992)

The Rotunda, Birmingham (1992)

The post-war redevelopment of Birmingham was a sorry story.

The City Engineer & Surveyor from 1935 to 1963, Sir Herbert Manzoni (1899-1972), notoriously declared in 1957, “I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past.  They are often more sentimental than valuable. In fact, I sometimes deplore the modern tendency to pay exaggerated respect to everything old…

“As to Birmingham’s buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture.  Its replacement should be an improvement, provided we keep a few monuments as museum pieces to past ages.  Such buildings as the Town Hall, the Law Courts and a few churches will undoubtedly be retained…As for future generations, I think they will be better occupied in applying their thoughts and energies to forging ahead, rather than looking backward.”

Ironically, much that Manzoni’s generation built in Birmingham in place of Victorian and older buildings is now under threat, but James A Roberts’ Rotunda (1964-5) remains most dominant, memorable and perhaps the most satisfying of the 1960s buildings in the city.

271 feet high from road level, it was designed to provided accommodation for two storeys of shops, three storeys for a bank, one of them the strong room, sixteen office floors and two floors for services, plus a parapet.

The penthouse floor was occupied as offices by the James A Mander Design Group, an architectural practice of which the senior partner was James A Roberts.

Roberts had the satisfaction of seeing his design become the subject of an outcry when it was threatened with demolition in the 1980s.  Listed in 2000, it was refurbished as apartments for the developer Urban Splash by Glenn Howells (2004-8).

Not everything that was built in the 1960s was regrettable.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Royal flush

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Royal bathroom, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

Royal bathroom, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

When my friend Jenny and I visited Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, I was disappointed not to be able to show her the royal bathroom.

The early twentieth-century owner of Kedleston, the Viceroy Lord Curzon was ambitious to entertain King George V and Queen Mary, and in anticipation had an en-suite bathroom discreetly added to the State Bedroom.

I had the opportunity to photograph this some years ago, but the room stewards assured us, with regret, that it’s not usually shown to the public.

Apparently there’s a second modern (that is, early twentieth-century) bathroom, which I haven’t seen, nearby.

As consolation, Jenny and I were allowed to see the po-cupboard next to the dining room.  This common, convenient feature of grand dining was for the use of gentlemen after the ladies had retired to the drawing room.

It saved a long trek in white tie and tails.

I duly photographed the po-cupboard, but the royal bathroom is far finer.

For visitor information about Kedleston Hall see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/kedleston-hall.

 

Man of letters

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Ex-London Transport RM1670, Christchurch, New Zealand (February 2011)

Ex-London Transport RM1670, Christchurch, New Zealand (February 2011)

A few years ago my cousin Richard and I dined at the now-defunct Paradiso Inferno on London’s Strand, an Italian restaurant that I understand was a favourite of the late, great journalist, Bill Deedes (1913-2007).

Richard is actually my first cousin once removed, so we’re a generation apart and I’m as fascinated by his understanding of the technological present as he is bemused by my ramblings about the historical past.

I pointed, as a tease, to the succession of red buses that stopped nearby, and mentioned that if you look closely at the destination indicators, the letter ‘l’ curls at the base and the dots of the ‘i’ and ‘j’ characters are actually diamonds.

That’s because the lettering is not Gill Sans but the specific font that London Transport’s chief executive officer, Frank Pick (1878-1941), commissioned from the typographer Edward Johnston (1872-1944).

This formed part of Pick’s campaign to give the capital’s transport system a uniform brand-image at every level from architecture and vehicle livery to poster-design and typography.

Frank Pick is a towering figure in modern marketing, and his legacy continues to colour the streets of London.

After all, though London Transport was broken up in 2000 and its bus-services are now run by a variety of operators, Transport for London still uses a revision of the Johnston font and the trademark roundel, and the buses are still red.

For the whole of our meal on the Strand, Richard and I found ourselves looking up at passing buses to check that the ‘i’s and ‘j’s really did have diamonds for dots and that the ‘l’s were turned up at the base.

Versions of Johnston’s Underground font crop up unexpectedly, even – as in the illustration above – in New Zealand.

An interesting article on Frank Pick, Edward Johnston and the designer of TfL New Johnston, Eiichi Kono, is at Edward Johnston: the man behind London’s lettering | London Transport Museum (ltmuseum.co.uk).

Ritz in bits

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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”

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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.

Footprints on the phantom dance-floor

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Former Lewis's department store, Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester (2009)

Former Lewis’s department store, Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester (2009)

It amuses me when highly respectable historical and amenity societies report the activities of urban explorers.

Those risk-taking, law-bending, under-the-wire investigators of derelict and inaccessible structures are distinguished by their principles – “take nothing but photographs;  leave nothing but footprints” – and the quality of their photography.

They must be a great annoyance to property-owners who would prefer their empty and neglected spaces to remain unvisited and to become forgotten.

For conservationists and architectural historians, however, it’s very useful to have assiduous and athletic enthusiasts reporting on the web the current condition of endangered sites of heritage importance.

I repeatedly visit Manchester, and yet hadn’t given a second glance to the Primark store in Piccadilly.  It was originally Lewis’s, described by Clare Hartwell in the Pevsner Architectural Guide, Manchester, as “a huge untidy Baroque pile” built by J W Beaumont & Sons in 1915 and extended by the same architects in 1929.

Clare Hartwell says it was the biggest department store in the provinces when it was built.  Lewis’s stores aspired to bring the splendour of London department stores to the major provincial cities [see Losing a Liverpool legend:  Lewis’s department store].

The Primark chain only uses the lower floors of the Manchester building, and above the snowline lies a sleeping treasure – Lewis’s ballroom:  http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=68769.

 

Premiere picture palace

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Embassy Theatre, Wellington, New Zealand

Embassy Theatre, Wellington, New Zealand

When I visited the Wellington Decorative & Fine Arts Society to present my Fun Palaces lecture in February 2011 my host, David Carson-Parker, showed me the Embassy Theatre, a restoration-project in which he had been involved.

The Embassy was originally and appropriately called the “De Luxe”.  It was designed by the New Zealand architect Llewellyn E Williams (1884-1967) for the theatre entrepreneur William Robert Kemball (1881-1969), and opened on October 31st 1924.

It was and is a notably distinguished building on a corner site facing Courtenay Place, four storeys high with an impressive classical frontage.  The grand tiled foyer and staircase remains:  originally the auditorium consisted of stalls and a generous balcony.  The stage was suitable for live performances and there was an orchestra pit, which was later used to house the console of a Wurlitzer organ and is now the second screen, the aptly-named Cinema Deluxe.

The De Luxe passed to another New Zealand cinema magnate, Robert Kerridge, who renamed it the Embassy.

In 1960 it was equipped with a wide screen for 70mm projection, and in the 1970s the auditorium was converted to a single rake by building out from the balcony front, so that the stalls space could be used for other purposes.

A 1991 project to convert it as a home for the Royal New Zealand Ballet came to nothing, and there was a risk that the Embassy would be lost.

To resist this possibility the Embassy Theatre Trust was formed in 1995.  In conjunction with the Wellington City Council, the Trust bought the building in 1997 and restored it to greater glory.

It re-opened in time to host the world premiere of Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King (2003), the final part of his Lord of the Rings trilogy.  As such, it now holds a place in the history of New Zealand film, and well as New Zealand cinema.

When David showed me round on a quiet summer Sunday morning, my first reaction was – what a splendid place to have coffee and read the Sunday papers.  You can eat and drink at Blondini’s Café & Bar, and indeed take your refreshments into the auditorium, which consists of the original balcony and a few additional rows beyond the balcony front.

The refurbished auditorium has all the comforts and amenity that contemporary filmgoers expect.  Behind the modern screen, however, the original proscenium and ante-proscenium remain in faded pale blue, grey, pink and gold.

David tells me there’s a scheme to make this original decoration visible from the auditorium.

When we showed images of it to the Wellington DFAS audience, people were astonished to discover that it still existed, and delighted to find that there’s more to the Embassy than meets the eye.

There is a detailed description of the Embassy Theatre at http://www.historic.org.nz/TheRegister/RegisterSearch/RegisterResults.aspx?RID=7500&m=advanced.  If you need to know what’s on at the moment, the website is at http://www.eventcinemas.co.nz/cinemas/the-embassy.aspx.