Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Putting the heart in the city

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Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2010) © Mike Higginbottom
Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2024) © Hasna Khan

Leah’s Yard, so long unrecognised except by historians and industrial archaeologists, is at last established as the jewel in the crown of Sheffield’s game-changing Heart of the City development.

In an astute comment to an article in the Sheffield Tribune in October 2023, Robin Hughes pointed out that the prehistory of Heart of the City goes back to the 1960s when Sheffield City Council decided not to demolish much of the city centre to accommodate a ring road inside the inner ring road and awarded the flagship retail site on Cambridge Street to what was then Cole Brothers. 

Subsequent development schemes came and went, yet the beauty of Heart of the City, led by the Director of City Centre Development, Nalin Seneviratne from 2017, is its piecemeal but coherent configuration, which has respected many though not all the surviving heritage buildings.

Most people who think about it would describe Leah’s Yard as a set of “little mesters” workshops, where the myriad small craftsmen worked together in close co-operation at their highly specialised metal trades for which Sheffield has been celebrated for centuries.

In fact, in its early days Leah’s Yard belonged to single occupants, initially a toolmaker, George Linley, who occupied the site in either 1817 or 1825.  By 1842 it had become John Morton’s Coalpit Lane Horn Works, making handles for cutlery and knives.

(The coal pit was an outcrop where Furnival Gate now runs.  Coalpit Lane was renamed when the Duke of Cambridge laid the foundation stone of the Crimea Monument at the top of The Moor in 1857.)

The works remained a horn manufactory until a die-stamper, Henry Leah, took over in 1891.

The Leahs found they had more room than they needed for their business and let space to up to eighteen different tradesmen at one time.  By the beginning of the twentieth century Leah’s Yard was indeed a little mesters’ workplace.

Henry Leah’s son, grandson and great-grandson successively ran the place until 1976 when their business was amalgamated with Spear & Jackson.

The site was listed Grade II* in 1983 for its rarity and completeness.  This presented difficulties for development planners and arguably ensured that the heritage buildings around Cambridge Street should be incorporated in the new build.

Leah’s Yard had no future as a museum piece, and the patina of grime and grit has had to go.  I’m told that the restoration had more latitude than would have been possible in a historically accurate recreation.

Scrubbed up but outwardly intact, managed by local entrepreneurs James O’Hara and Tom Wolfenden, Leah’s Yard is already proving a magnet for high-end retailers and small businesses:  the digital news outlet Tribune has relocated to the Yard, as has the podcast creator Persephonica.

Leah’s Yard preserves a precious though not unique piece of Sheffield’s heritage, echoing the diversity of the industrial past.

Its significance deserves light-touch interpretative displays so that visitors can discover the meaning of the place.

Meanwhile, the planners’ next dilemma sits across the road, where the former Cole Brothers store is waiting for a fresh purpose.

Leeds’ secret garden

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Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds

After a day out in Manchester where we enjoyed the Castlefield Viaduct high-line garden, my friend Ann and I decided to take a day-trip to Leeds to look at the Monk Bridge Viaduct, which turns out to be a closely-guarded secret.

It’s remarkably difficult to find:  there seems to be no signage whatsoever, and street maps show where an abandoned railway crosses the River Aire but offer no indication how to approach the elevated former trackbed.

If we’d simply walked out of the station and turned left we’d have found it within a spacious housing development called The Junction.  But we’re from Sheffield.  How are we supposed to know?

The viaduct is worth seeking out, nevertheless, as a monument to the period when the new-fangled railways embellished their engineering with grand architectural decoration.

From 1834 onwards five separate railway companies converged on the flat land beside the River Aire as near as possible to the centre of Leeds, their approach lines criss-crossing and twisting in a cat’s-cradle over the river and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

The Midland Railway opened a terminus, Leeds Wellington Station, in 1846, while the other four companies shared a joint station, Leeds Central Station, in 1854 and built an east-west through line served by Leeds New Station in 1869 (renamed Leeds City in 1938).

In the 1960s British Railways concentrated all its passenger services in Leeds City (renamed simply Leeds) and subsequently Leeds Central was demolished and part of its viaduct approach replaced by Royal Mail House (1975 – reconstructed as West Central, 2003, and later West Point).

The surviving viaduct, including a stately bridge over the River Aire, has now become the spine of The Junction, a very smart residential development geared to people who work from home, and the former trackbed is ingeniously landscaped so that it doesn’t look like a corridor to carry railway lines.

Ann and I parked ourselves at a table in front of The Junc Shack, where a civilised queue of (presumably) residents and workers seemed content to wait for carefully prepared and courteously served food and drinks from Alfonso’s Cuban Shack, where the generously filled pastrami bagel proved to be a substitute for lunch.

On a fine day, within ten minutes’ walk of Leeds Station, The Junction is worth visiting. 

If you ask the Junc Shack crew nicely, they’ll show you how to access the splendid loos.

Brunel’s starting point

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Paddington Station, London

It’s one thing to learn from the standard book about a historic building, but walking round it with the author provides a different level of understanding.

Steven Brindle’s Paddington Station: its history and architecture (English Heritage 2013) in its second edition represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of one of Britain’s most important stations.

I took the opportunity to walk round the station with Steven as part of a group of Victorian Society members on a Saturday afternoon amid the hubbub of trains arriving and departing every few minutes, high-volume PA announcements, assistance trolleys conveying people up and down the platforms and noisy families taking selfies in front of the statue of Paddington Bear.

Now the second busiest station in the UK (after London Liverpool Street), Paddington Station remains a monument to the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) who was chosen to plan and build the Great Western Railway after winning the competition to design the Clifton Suspension Bridge and making himself popular with Bristol grandees for assisting in managing the chaos caused by the Reform Bill riots of 1831.

Steven made the station’s original layout clear by starting his tour halfway down Platform 1, next to Marcus Cornish’s statue of Paddington Bear. 

This was the side from which the first trains departed, and the buildings planned by Brunel and designed by Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820-1877) largely survive, including the Royal Waiting Room, now the first-class lounge.

Brunel ensured that the Great Western Railway was at the forefront of Victorian technology though some of his ideas were in advance of practicality:  the seven-foot broad gauge finally expired in 1892 and his atmospheric railway lasted less than a year.  Nevertheless, trains still run between Paddington and the South-West as they have since 1838, from under the magnificent glazed train-shed that Brunel and Wyatt completed in 1854. 

Three spans of wrought-iron arches cover the tracks, supported by columns that were originally cast iron, replaced by steel in 1922-24.  The transepts which break up the vista were thought to accommodate turntable tracks for shifting early rolling stock, but thorough recent research casts doubt on this idea.

The Great Western Railway was at once innovative and conservative, so when the removal of the broad-gauge tracks made it possible to increase the number of platforms it was accomplished without compromising Brunel and Wyatt’s train shed.

I’d never fully grasped how the separation of the original four departure and arrival platforms worked until I followed Steven round and learned that Brunel’s buildings on the northern arrival side were demolished in the early twentieth century.

The north side of the station has been repeatedly altered, first with the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway terminus, tucked in the north-west corner, in 1863, then the Span Four extension (1913-14), which respectfully follows the proportions of the 1854 station, and again when new buildings were added by the company architect, Percy Emerson Culverhouse (1871-1953), in the 1930s.

In the course of its history the station has extended from four platforms to seventeen including through platforms for the Underground and the Elizabeth Line.

Steven Brindle couldn’t show us the most remarkable of his discoveries at Paddington Station, the remaining span of Brunel’s first iron bridge, over the canal at Bishop’s Bridge.   The actual ironwork is in store in Fort Cumberland near Portsmouth.  The story is at Bishop’s Bridge – Wikipedia.

L T C Rolt relates that at an early meeting of the Great Western Railway directors, someone cast doubts on the practicality of driving a railway all the way from London to Bristol, and Brunel replied, “Why not make it longer, and have a steamboat go from Bristol to New York and call it the Great Western?”

You can take a train from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads, passing the Wharncliffe Viaduct, the Maidenhead Bridge, Sonning Cutting, Swindon and Box Tunnel – each of them a pioneering work of genius – to visit Brunel’s surviving steamship, SS Great Britain, in the dry dock in which she was built.

He was a truly remarkable man who lived a remarkable life.

Richardson’s masterpiece

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Pittsburgh, PA: Allegheny Courthouse, internal courtyard
Pittsburgh, PA: Allegheny Courthouse, internal courtyard

When I stepped out of the back entrance to the Omni William Penn Hotel on the first morning of my visit to Pittsburgh, I was confronted only a couple of hundred yards down the street by one of the masterpieces of American architecture by one of its master architects, the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail (1883-88).

Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) was responsible for a catalogue of memorable buildings, many of them so immediately recognisable that their distinctive style is named after him – Richardsonian Romanesque.

Though he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris he didn’t simply recreate the neoclassical Beaux-Arts style in the USA;  he distilled elements of European architecture based on the solidity of medieval Romanesque – solid, rusticated masonry, sturdy round arches (including Syrian arches which rise directly from the ground), dormer windows (including Japanese-derived eyelid dormers), extended eaves and tall towers with capped roofs.

He claimed he could design anything “from a cathedral to a chicken coop” but he’s best remembered for houses, public libraries, railway stations and grand public buildings.

Richardson himself believed that the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail was his greatest achievement.

The courthouse stands four storeys high with a five-storey tower punctuating the main façade. An internal courtyard provides light to the interior as well as a cool space with a fountain away from the street. 

The jail is connected with the courthouse across a road by a close imitation of the Bridge of Sighs at the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

Richardson’s influence on American architecture is unmistakable, whether in his own designs, like the Glessner House in Chicago, or in those of his followers such as Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and, at a further remove, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) in such Prairie-style houses as the Robie House, also in Chicago.

Few architects have a style named after them.

Kew Gardens

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Kew Gardens, London: The Great Pagoda
Kew Gardens, London: The Great Pagoda
Kew Gardens, London: Temperate House
Kew Gardens, London: Temperate House
Kew Gardens, London: Palm House
Kew Gardens, London: Palm House

I have a blind spot about botany, probably because I spent my Sheffield childhood in smoky, sulphurous 1950s Attercliffe, where the only indigenous flowers were dandelions and the only plants my mother could grow in her window box were nasturtiums.

Spending a Sunday recently at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was instructive, because every time I looked at a plant I had to read the label.  So I found out what tamarind, the distinctive ingredient of Sheffield’s favourite condiment, Henderson’s Relish, looks like, dug into my smartphone dictionary to discover that ‘symbiotic’ means, in effect, a win-win relationship between different organisms, and learned that bamboo is in fact giant-sized grass.

To describe Kew Gardens as world-class is a simple statement of fact.  It sits at the heart of an international network of organisations that through research and education foster the study and conservation of plants, seeds and fungi, alongside an enormous collection of botanical books and illustrations.

There have been royal residences south of the River Thames around Kew since the Middle Ages.  Sheen Palace (1299), a favourite residence of sovereigns from Edward I to Richard II, was reconstructed by Henry V in 1414.  After the timber palace burnt down in 1497, Henry VII rebuilt it and changed its name to the title he had derived from the Yorkshire town – Richmond.

The estate became a favourite retreat of the Hanoverian royal family at the start of the eighteenth century.

When Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751), the son of George II and father of George III, lived there, the poet Alexander Pope gave him a puppy which wore a collar engraved with the couplet –

I am His Highness’ dog at Kew.

Pray, tell me Sir, whose dog are you?

Frederick’s widow, the Dowager Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1719-1772), was responsible for embellishing the gardens with a plethora of ornamental buildings, mostly now lost, by the Swedish-Scottish architect Sir William Chambers (1723-1796), of which the largest is the Great Pagoda (1761). 

Chambers’ buildings are mostly straight-faced Neoclassical, but at Kew he had the opportunity to design for enjoyment.  Unusually for his generation, he had travelled in China, and his pagoda is the epitome of Chinoiserie, ten storeys high, rising to 163ft, built in brick embellished with eighty fearsome dragons, originally enamel. 

Horace Walpole, who lived at Strawberry Hill across the river, was impressed when the huge ornament went up in six months flat, writing to a friend – “…the Pagoda at Kew begins to rise above the trees and soon you will see it from Yorkshire”.

The whole structure was lovingly restored in 2018.  The dragons on the first level are carved wood by Tim Crawley, Head of Historic Carving at the City and Guilds of London Art School.  Those higher up, to lighten the load on the structure, are 3D-printed nylon:  How we brought dragons back to Kew | Kew Palace | Historic Royal Palaces (hrp.org.uk).

After Kew was designated the national botanic garden in 1840 the pleasure buildings gave place to functional structures to house and nurture the collections.  The architect Decimus Burton (1800-1881) collaborated with the Irish iron-founder Richard Turner (1798-1881) to devise the wrought-iron Palm House (1844-48), 362 feet long, with hand-blown curved-glass roofs extending to 62 feet in height.  It’s a memorable space to wander in, with opportunities to ascend the spiral staircases for a bird’s-eye view of the palms and the building itself.

Decimus Burton subsequently collaborated with the Director of the Royal Botanic Garden, Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), in designing the Temperate House (1859-62), which is longer (628 feet), lower and less elegant than the Palm House.  For practical reasons, to moderate indoor temperature in hot weather, the glass is entirely straight and the window-sashes are wood so they can be opened.

From the outset these serious, scientific structures admitted the general public, and Key Gardens remains one of London’s most popular tourist attractions.

Even a botanical ignoramus like me needs more than one whole-day visit to sample all its attractions:  Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | Kew.

Street’s favourite church

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All Saints' Church, Denstone, Staffordshire: font
All Saints’ Church, Denstone, Staffordshire: font

There’s a story about the great Victorian architect Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) hopping off a train in a provincial town, marching down the street to a partly-built Gothic church and entering the site and giving orders, until the clerk of works approached and said, “Excuse me, Mr Scott.  This is Mr Street’s church.  Yours is further down the road.”

Both these architects were busy men.

Mr Street was George Edmund Street (1824-1881), who was one of Scott’s pupils for five years and established his own practice in 1849.  He was predominantly a church architect, but is best known for his Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London (1873-82).

One of Street’s finest designs – All Saints’ Church, Denstone (1860-62) – is in Staffordshire, a county rich in fine Gothic churches by the best Victorian architects.

All Saints’ was financed by the patron of the living, Sir Thomas Percival Heywood, Bt (1823-1897), who had retired from his father’s Manchester bank and abandoned his Unitarian faith to join the Church of England.  Sir Percival wished to establish a new parish with a church reflecting Anglo-Catholic architecture and worship in an area still dominated by Evangelical practice.

He retired to his family’s country home, Dove Leys, which he enlarged, endowed the nearby village of Denstone with the parish church (1860-62), the vicarage and the school (1866), all of them, together with the lychgate and churchyard cross, designed by George Edmund Street.  

At All Saints’ Street was responsible not only for the exterior, a composition of nave, taller apsidal chancel and circular north tower with its conical cap, but also for its opulent interior.  The entire church, inside and out, is characterised by structural polychromy, the cream Hollington stone highlighted by bands of pink stone. 

All the original interior fittings were designed by Street:  the font, reredos, organ case and pulpit were all carved by Thomas Earp (1828-1893), and the floor-tiles were manufactured by Mintons of Stoke-on-Trent.  The stained glass was manufactured by the newly-established Clayton & Bell company.  Derbyshire marble and alabaster are freely applied to give richness to the interior.

The windows are of varying designs, intended to bring daylight where it was most needed:  the south aisle has two traceried windows, in contrast to the narrow lancets in the north aisle.  There is a single rose window above the font in the north-west corner of the nave.  So that the chancel could be lit by tall windows, the walls are significantly higher than the nave.

Street regarded All Soul’s, Denstone as his favourite church and it is undoubtedly one of his finest compositions.  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, in The Buildings of England:  Staffordshire (1974), remarked, “…here indeed is young Street at his very best”.

Denstone is very close to Alton Towers and only a few miles from A W N Pugin’s masterpiece, St Giles’ Catholic Church, Cheadle (1841-46).  Less than twenty miles away is Holy Angels, Hoar Cross (1872-1901), one of the best churches of another master of English Gothic Revival, George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907), who was another of Scott’s early pupils.

These leaders of their profession were more than nodding acquaintances.  Bodley attended two London churches – All Saints’, Margaret Street, where Street was churchwarden, and St Alban’s, Holborn, where Scott also worshipped.

Destination station

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Schlesisches Tor U-bahn station, Berlin

The Schlesisches Tor station on Berlin’s U1 elevated railway is spectacular – much more than a place to catch a train.

It formed part of Berlin’s first overground electric rail service, built to the designs of the architects Hans Grisebach (1848-1904) and Georg Dinklage (1849-1926) by the construction company Siemens & Halske, pioneers of electric traction.  Heinrich Giesecke (1862-1937) was responsible for the architectural decoration which included elaborately carved stonework, wrought-ironwork and an onion-dome turret.

Its opulent historicist style gave it prestige, and the street-level facilities were generous – several shops, including a pastry shop, and a restaurant named Torkrug.

Named after a former entrance to the city, the Silesian Gate, it was opened in 1902.

It suffered a direct hit in an Allied air raid on March 11th-12th 1945, but services continued until the power supply failed, putting the entire network out of action on April 22nd.

For a time after the end of the War Schlesisches Tor became a terminus until the through service was restored in April 1947.  It was interrupted again, briefly during an uprising in 1953, and ultimately when the Berlin Wall divided the city in 1961.  The through service was eventually reopened in 1995.

Even before reunification the station was recognised as a historic monument.  The former restaurant was occupied by a retail store, the Kaufhaus am Tor (commonly shortened to Kato).  The name Kato was perpetuated by a club which took over the space after 1981.  From 2012 Kato was succeeded by a night-club, Bi Nuu.

The station was listed in 1980 and renovated for the International Building Exhibition in 1984 and the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin in 1987.

A commemorative plaque honours Alfred Flatow (1869-1942), a Jewish gymnast who won three gold and one silver medals in the 1896 Olympic Games.  He and his colleagues were suspended by the national gymnastics governing body Deutsche Turnerschaft which regarded the Games as “unGerman”.  Alfred and his cousin Gustav (1875-1945), who himself won two gold medals in 1896, were among the founders of the Judische Turnerschaft in 1903.  Both perished in the Holocaust – Alfred at the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp and Gustav in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

Both cousins are commemorated in the naming of the Flatow-Sporthalle nearby, the renaming of the Reichssportsfeld Strasse [street of the National Sports Complex] as Flatowallee [Flatow Boulevard].  They are also illustrated on one of a set of four stamps issued by Deutsche Post to celebrate the centenary of the 1896 Olympic Games.

Appleton Water Tower

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Appleton Water Tower, Sandringham, Norfolk (1980)

Accounts of the nineteenth-century “Sanitary Question” – the controversy over how to resolve the environmental problems of water-supply, sewerage and disposal of the dead – usually focus on the rapidly expanding, densely-populated towns and cities and their poor, unhealthy and undernourished populations of the time.

In fact, the crises of public health and limited medical knowledge cost the lives of individuals in all levels of society.

The best-known example of a prominent life cut short by avoidable disease in this period is Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819-1861).  He died, after several weeks’ illness, at Windsor on December 9th 1861, probably of typhoid, leaving a shocked nation and a bereft widow.

His accumulating personal woes would have undoubtedly lowered his spirits and sapped his physical strength – several years of discomfort from stomach cramps, a near-death experience in a carriage accident, the death of his mother-in-law, concern over his eldest son’s liaison with an Irish actress and the strain of being involved in a diplomatic skirmish, the Trent affair.

However, it was the fetid drains under Windsor Castle that almost certainly did for him.

He was not alone.  In the same few weeks of 1861, typhoid swept through the Portuguese royal family, who were Prince Albert’s young cousins,– the Infante Ferdinand (15) on November 6th, his brother King Pedro V (24) on November 11th and another brother, Infante João, Duke of Beja (19) on December 27th.

A decade later, by which time the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (1841-1910), had married, raised a family and acquired the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, he himself contracted typhoid while staying with the Earl of Londesborough at Scarborough.  A fellow guest, the 7th Earl of Chesterfield, and the Prince of Wales’ groom died of the disease, but His Royal Highness recovered.

It seems that the drains at Londesborough Lodge were no better than those at Windsor Castle.

The Prince quickly enlisted the experienced civil engineer Robert Rawlinson (1810-1898) and a sanitary specialist James Mansergh (1834-1905) to ensure that the newly completed Sandringham House was safely supplied with water and properly drained.

The nearest supply, a chalk spring about a mile away, was twenty feet lower in altitude than the ground floor of the house, and the highest point on the estate was only five feet higher than the roof.

Not only did the supply require pumping, but a greater head of water was needed for fire-fighting.

The solution was to construct a sixty-foot-high water tower, surmounted by a 32,000-gallon tank, overlooking the surrounding landscape and visible for miles.

James Mansergh designed an elegant brick structure in a style he called “neo-Byzantine” in polychrome brick and local stone.

Its two lower storeys provided accommodation for a caretaker, and the second floor, accessible by a private staircase, was reserved for the occasional entertainment of royal house parties who could, if they wished, climb to the top of the tank to enjoy the view.

The chimney flues from the fireplaces ran through the centre of the tank to prevent the water freezing in heavy frosts.

The four foundation stones were laid on July 4th 1877 by Alexandra, Princess of Wales, her brother Prince Waldemar of Denmark, and the Wales’s two young sons, Princes Albert Victor and George (later King George V).

When the water-supply system was completed the following year, the hydrants surrounding Sandringham House were tested by a personal friend of the Prince of Wales, the celebrated Chief of the London Fire Brigade, Captain Sir Eyre Massey Shaw KCB (1830-1908), “to his entire satisfaction”.

The water-supply system was maintained first by the Sandringham estate and later by the local water authority until 1963.  Four years later the Tower was leased to the Landmark Trust which cleared away the surrounding outbuildings and converted the first three storeys into a memorable holiday let  [Holiday at Appleton Water Tower, Sandringham | The Landmark Trust], receiving its first visitors exactly a hundred years after the foundation stones were laid.

156 years of continuing prayer

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St Charles Borromeo Roman Catholic Church, Attercliffe, Sheffield

When I run my annual Heritage Open Days Walk Round Attercliffe we visit one of only two remaining Christian places of worship in the Lower Don Valley. It’s also the only historic place of worship in the Valley that has been in continuous use since it was built.

The Roman Catholic Church of St Charles Borromeo was consecrated in 1868 to provide a home for a congregation that had been meeting since 1864.

This was the time when the flat rural meadows and gardens of the Lower Don Valley were being replaced by huge steelworks served by rail and canal. 

Housing for the workers, many of whom came from surrounding counties and as far away as Ireland, had to be within walking distance of the works because public transport was inadequate and expensive.

The church was the gift of Mr William Wake of Osgathorpe, and partly financed by gifts of £500 each from the Duke of Norfolk and from Mrs Wake and her family.  The eventual cost was £4,700. 

The dedication commemorates the Wakes’ son, Charles, who drowned while skating on the Serpentine in Regent’s Park in January 1867.

The building was designed by Charles John Innocent (1837-1901) and Thomas Brown (c1845-1881), who went on to design nineteen out of the twenty-two schools built by the Sheffield School Board from 1873 onwards.

Initially only the nave and the presbytery were constructed.  Charles Innocent returned in 1887 to oversee the lengthening of the nave and the construction of the baptistery and two porches to the west and the chancel, Lady Chapel and sacristy to the east.  These extensions, costing £2,400, were the gift of the Duke of Norfolk and Mr and Mrs Wade.

The interior is spacious and light, with a hammerbeam roof.  The screens, choir stalls and pulpit were designed by C J Innocent and carved by the sculptor Harry Hems of Exeter (1842-1916).  The organ is by the Norwich builder Norman & Beard, and dates from 1911.

The adjacent brick-built school was originally built in 1871 and rebuilt in 1929 in memory of the first rector of the parish, Father Joseph Hurst, who served from 1866 to 1905.  It was remodelled in 1964 by Hadfield, Cawkwell & Davidson, and closed because of falling rolls in 1981. 

After some years of use for Youth Training Scheme activities it became the Diocese of Hallam Pastoral Centre, opening on June 27th 1990.

Alongside the Centre, regular services continue in the church of St Charles, as they have done since 1868.

St Charles Borromeo Church is a destination on Mike Higginbottom’s Heritage Open Days A Walk Round Attercliffe which takes place on Friday September 6th 2024 from 10am to 12.30pm, starting and finishing at the Attercliffe tram stop.  

Call 07946-650672 or e-mail mike@mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk to book.

St Anne’s Roman Catholic Church, Keighley

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St Anne’s Roman Catholic Parish Church, Keighley, West Yorkshire

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) began his career as an architect in the early 1830s, empowered by two events, the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829) and his own conversion to Catholicism in 1834, which led him to become the great pioneer of the Gothic Revival in the British Isles and across the world.

John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury (1791-1852) enlisted him to design Catholic churches, monasteries and schools, and Sir Charles Barry (1795-1860) hired him to contribute detailed designs to the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster for which he was never in his lifetime accorded adequate credit.

In a short career lasting barely a decade Pugin directed his prodigious artistic talent to provide inexpensive church designs for impoverished congregations alongside opulent commissions for wealthy Catholic patrons.

He was capable of devising simple, dignified parish churches for as little as £3,000, yet when he had access to a generous budget – and when he was footing the bill himself – he spent lavishly and designed richly.

St Anne’s, Keighley is typical of his low-budget commissions, a modest nave with a short chancel and a belfry which fell down during construction and had to be rebuilt.  The current edition of Pevsner’s Buildings of England:  Yorkshire West Riding – Leeds, Bradford and the North (Yale University Press 2009) points out that the simplicity of the lancet windows were “popular among less exacting architects”;  given the chance, Pugin would have insisted on tracery.

The Pevsner volume (p 353) shows an 1843 engraving of the building in its original form – modest, simple, elegant, and instantly recognisable as essentially Pugin.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century the congregation had outgrown the building and the Bradford architect Edward Simpson (1844-1937) turned the place on its axis and more than doubled its floor area in 1907.

Pugin had observed the tradition that worshippers should face east towards Jerusalem, but his chancel became the entrance, and at the west end Simpson added a florid new chancel and a pair of double transepts.  They are clearly by a different hand, yet Simpson shows respect for the original design.  This layout is practical, providing direct entry from North Street, and is visually harmonious.

The interior was extensively beautified in the period 1908-1915.  Pugin’s 1841 east window by Thomas Willement (1786-1871) remains above the entrance doors, and the original altar is now in the Chapel of Our Lady.  The main sanctuary has an imposing high altar and reredos, installed in 1915:  Taking Stock – Catholic Churches of England and Wales (taking-stock.org.uk).

It’s ironic that when a similar rearrangement was proposed at the former St Aidan’s, Small Heath, Birmingham, now All Saints’, in 1998, the Victorian Society strongly objected, until firmly told by the Chancellor of the Consistory Court that worship took precedence over antiquarianism.

St Anne’s amalgamated with the nearby parish of Our Lady Of Victories Keighley in 2016 and it’s apparent from the parish website that the congregation is thriving:  St Anne’s Catholic Church – Priest’s Welcome (stanneskeighley.org.uk).

The parish has a long tradition of welcoming strangers to its community – “…not only the Irish immigrants but later on the Italians, Poles, Slovenians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Latvians, Czechoslovakians, people from many African countries and most recently Indians from Kerela as well as many migrant workers from Eastern Europe” – and supports socially and economically disadvantaged members of the local community through its charity shop and at the Good Shepherd Centre:  St Anne’s Catholic Church – Good Shepherd Centre (stanneskeighley.org.uk).