Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Exploring Turin:  Mole Antonelliana

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Mole Antonelliana, Turin, Italy

The tallest and easily the most preposterous building in Turin is the Mole Antonelliana, which towers over its surroundings and is visible from all quarters.

It’s named after its architect, Alessandro Antonelli (1798-1888);  the Italian word ‘mole’, which has two syllables, translates as “something of great size”.

The project began as a synagogue, initiated in the short period (1860-64) that Turin, as capital of the former kingdom of Sardinia, had become the capital of the newly united Kingdom of Italy.  The Jewish congregation wished to construct a place of worship that befitted the capital city.

For that reason they engaged Antonelli, who as a professor of the city’s Albertina Academy of Fine Arts (Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti) had built much in Turin.

However, it seems that when the capital moved to Rome in 1864 some members of the congregation followed it, reducing the numbers and the fund-raising capacity of those who remained in Turin.

Alessandro Antonelli had an obsession with building high:  given the opportunity he contrived structures out of all proportion to practical need, simply to make them prominent at a distance.  He provided a design to raise the campanile of the Basilica of San Gaudenzio in Novara, and if the Turin congregation had taken a close look at the Novara project they might have saved themselves much trouble. 

The basilica’s campanile was begun in 1844 but construction was interrupted by the First Italian War of Independence in 1848-49.  Antonelli proposed to extend the total height to 397 feet in 1855:  Alessandro Antonelli’s Basilica of San Gaudenzio — On Verticality;  Alessandro Antonelli cupola di S. Gaudenzio Novara – Category:San Gaudenzio (Novara) – Dome – Wikimedia Commons.  After continuing arguments over cost and stability, the cupola was resumed in 1881 and completed in 1887.  Concerns about its strength have persisted:  indeed, it was closed for ten years from 1937 for fear of a possible collapse.  It still stands, and is pronounced safe.

In Turin, the Jewish congregation set aside a budget of 250,000 lire for a design which, when Antonelli designed a dome and cupola rising to 400 feet, would cost 280,000 lire.  Construction began in 1863, but the architect’s further modifications, to achieve a height of 550 feet, exhausted both the budget and the clients’ patience.  Construction paused in 1869 with a temporary roof.

The congregation eventually walked away in 1876 when costs reached 692,000 lire, but Torinese civic pride dictated that this extravagant structure could not be dismantled at even greater expense.

The solution was to exchange the site of the Mole for a location in San Salvario close to Porta Nuova Station where the Jews erected the Great Synagogue (Tempio Grande) in four years flat (1880-84):  Torino-Sinagoga – Synagogue of Turin – Wikipedia.  Enrico Petiti’s Moorish exterior still exists, though the interior was bombed in 1942 and entirely replaced in 1945-49:  Great Synagogue of Turin – Tempio Grande – Synagogues360 (anumuseum.org.il).

The Mole was completed in 1869, the year after Antonelli’s death.

This huge edifice served as the Museum of the Italian Risorgimento (Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano) until the museum was relocated to the Palazzo Carignano in 1938.  Since 2000 it has housed the National Museum of Cinema (Museo Nazionale del Cinema).

Travellers in Italy who pay in cash may be familiar with the Mole Antonelli.  It appears on the two-cent Italian Euro coin:  Eur.it.002 – 2 euro cent coin – Wikipedia.

Cotton College

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Cotton College & St Wilfrid’s Church, Staffordshire

In the heady days following the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury readily opened his cheque-book for schemes to further the cause of Catholicism in Britain.

He bought an estate at Cotton, a couple of miles north of Alton Towers in 1843.  It seems that he intended it as a residence for his nephew and heir, Bertram, and planned a road (only partly constructed) linking Cotton to Alton Towers.

His plan changed three years later, when the Earl offered the Hall to Father William Faber (1814-1863), who with a group of eleven followers had founded a community called the Brothers of the Will of God.

Father Faber was devout, energetic and incorrigible.  Always in uncertain health, he drove himself to accomplish God’s work, while following an erratic path from his Calvinist upbringing and his Anglican ordination to his conversion to Catholicism.

His small band of followers immediately began to construct, largely by their own hands, a Catholic church designed by A W N Pugin and dedicated to their patron saint, St Wilfrid, and a small school, even though there were no local Catholics apart from members of the Lord Shrewsbury’s retinue.

Though Pugin is always credited with the design, with its elegant broach spire, it’s unlikely that he had much to do with the interior:  he would have disapproved of the west gallery in which the choir sat until the late 1930s. 

Pugin intended the church to have “the only perfect chancel in England and with an East window he could die for” but it was never built.  The existing chancel and vestries were designed in 1936-37 by George Drysdale.

Faber felt strongly attracted to the Oratorians, an order firmly wedded to an urban ministry, and Faber resolved to leave Cotton to found what eventually became the London Oratory on Brompton Road in Kensington.

St Wilfrid’s Church was opened on Easter Tuesday, April 25th 1848, and in October of that year the forty Oratorians, led by Father (later Cardinal) John Newman, took up residence at Cotton Hall. 

Three months later, on January 30th 1849, they moved on to a disused gin distillery in Birmingham which became the basis of the Birmingham Oratory.

Lord Shrewsbury was not best pleased that Cotton had been abandoned, although a priest remained to continue the mission and the bishop confirmed 125 parishioners in October 1850. 

The Earl offered the Hall buildings to another religious group, the Passionists, who arrived on December 15th 1850.  They failed to settle at Cotton:  parish attendances rapidly declined – one writer described the locals as “loaves and fishes” Catholics – and the order failed to attract novices. 

The death of the 16th Earl in 1852 meant that financial support dried up, and by 1856 the order had moved on, heavily in debt, leaving the parish under the direct and remote supervision of the diocese of Birmingham and making the other Cotton buildings redundant.

The eventual solution was the transfer of Sedgeley Park School, a long-established Catholic institution dating from 1763, from its unsatisfactory premises on the southern outskirts of Wolverhampton. 

St Wilfrid’s Church and the preparatory department of the school opened on St Wilfrid’s Day 1868, and the rest of the school followed in 1873.  An initial building programme of 1874-75 was extended in 1886-87 and again in 1931-32. 

Financial pressure caused the closure of Cotton College in 1987.  Dry rot was discovered in the church in 2009, and the final Mass was celebrated on October 24th 2010.

The archdiocese stripped the interior of the Grade-II listed church so that it and the college buildings could converted to residential accommodation by the Amos Group:  St Wilfrid’s Church – Amos Group Ltd;  Cotton College – Amos Group Ltd.

Lives at the Edge

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Kirk Edge Convent boundary wall, High Bradfield, Sheffield

The high road from the northern Sheffield suburbs to the village of High Bradfield is called Kirk Edge Road.  Beyond the playing fields of Bradfield School, which are protected by a sturdy windbreak of trees, there is nothing but an expanse of green fields.  Until the 1950s this was heather-coloured moorland, yet it’s still both bleak and beautiful.

There are no roadside buildings.  Isolated farms, one of them called Spitewinter, are situated for shelter on south-facing slopes at a distance.  After about 1½ miles travelling west, a substantial stone wall encloses trees which hide the Kirk Edge Convent, a community of Carmelite nuns, which bears the formal title Carmel of the Holy Spirit.  (The name “Carmel” derives from Mount Carmel in Palestine, where the original founders of the order settled in the thirteenth century.)

It’s easy to drive past the place without realising it’s there.  The modest lodge at the entrance gives no information about its name or purpose.

There was nothing on the site when Henry, 15th Duke of Norfolk acquired the Kirk Edge estate in 1869 for the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul to set up a boys’ industrial school with the unrealistic aim of teaching them agriculture on a patch of uncleared moorland. 

The architect Miles Ellison Hadfield designed a building resembling a Parisian town house with high ceilings and large windows that was entirely unsuitable for a site eleven hundred feet above sea level on the edge of the Pennines.  It was completed in 1871 and later extended with a west wing and chapel in 1885, by which time it had become an orphanage for up to two hundred girls.

Water-supply was a problem:  well-water was hand-pumped to a tank in the roof space alongside a second rainwater tank, both of which froze solid in winter.  Gales blew slates off the roof and snow lingered for weeks.  The Duke of Norfolk provided coal, brought by cart from his collieries in Sheffield.  The girls left in 1887.

For a brief period in 1900-01 the Liverpool priest Father Nugent brought boys from his orphanage to Kirk Edge.  They too didn’t stay and the site remained unused except for providing summer holidays for poor Sheffield children until 1911 when the Duke, whose sister was a Carmelite nun, offered it to her order.

The Duke provided the nuns with improved facilities, including a new chapel, a windmill to pump the well-water and the boundary wall that provided the enclosure which their vocation required, but their living conditions were arduous until mains electricity was supplied in 1956 and mains water in 1964.

As far as possible the Convent was self-sufficient.  The sisters each maintained a patch of garden to produce fruit and vegetables, and grew flowers for decoration.  The Norfolk estate, and latterly a Sheffield businesswoman, provided food supplies, and the Convent attracted donations and discounts from the local community and Catholic supporters farther afield.

It’s difficult for people living ordinary lives, whether they’re religious or not, to understand the fervent attraction of monastic life in a closed order, free of distractions from focusing on the Almighty. 

A postulant who visited Kirk Edge in 2012 provided an online illustrated description of the sisters and their routine of worship, contemplation and recreation:  My Personal Visit Experience at Kirk Edge Carmel – Part I | Carmel, Garden of God and My Visit Experience to Kirk Edge Carmel – Part II | Carmel, Garden of God.

The inexorable decline in the number of postulants has obliged the sisters to close the Convent and move elsewhere, and the buildings are up for sale.  For the first time there are images in the public domain that indicate the quality of Miles Hadfield’s buildings, which are not listed:  28 bedroom character property for sale in High Bradfield, Bradfield, Sheffield, S6.

Whoever takes over the property will need a supply of shovels, grit and thermal underwear, without doubt.

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.