At the King’s Cross end of the Caledonian Road stands Keystone Crescent, the London crescent with the tightest radius and the only one in which the inner and the outer terraces have identical facades.
It was built as Caledonian Terrace in 1846, at a time when the surrounding district was first developed as middle-class housing, which rapidly went down the social scale because of the industries which grew along the River Fleet and, most of all, because of the noise and smoke of the surrounding railways.
The area has been transformed by the arrival of Eurostar, and the tiny two-storey houses with a basement and an attic have increased in value tenfold since the 1990s. They currently come on the market at over a million pounds.
The front gardens have been given over to hard standing for cars, but otherwise the crescent’s conservation-area status maintains its attractive appearance, a few steps away from the bustle of one of north London’s traffic arteries.
Keystone Crescent boasts its own basement club [http://www.keystonecrescent.com], founded by Kristie Bishop and Coralie Sleap, who also operate Drink, Shop & Do [http://drinkshopdo.co.uk], “a quirky multi-faceted cafe, bar and shop” a few yards away down the Caledonian Road.
Sheffield’s Old Town Hall, on Waingate, has stood empty and unmaintained for over twenty years. As far back as 2007 it figured on the Victorian Society’s annual list of endangered buildings, and it’s more recently been added to SAVE Britain’s Heritage Buildings at Risk register.
Eventually, in August this year, a planning application was
posted proposing a solution to the dilemma of what to do with this huge public
building with its sensitive interiors.
The new owner, Mr Efekoro Omu, is already refurbishing the long-neglected Cannon public house on Castle Street.
Mr Omu’s company, Aestrom OTH, plans to clean and restore
the exterior of the Old Town Hall, and intends to strip out much of the listed
interior to provide twelve serviced apartments, twelve “pod” hotel rooms in the
old cells and, on the basement and lower ground-floor levels, a “souk” – “a
boutique marketplace of characterful commercial spaces” of 918 square metres
(equal to 3½ tennis courts).
The Friends of the Old Town Hall, an energetic group of volunteers who have been monitoring the building since 2014, applauded the arrival of someone actually prepared to take on the building but were highly critical of the proposed alterations to the interior.
Mr Omu’s scheme threatens to obliterate the three most
impressive courtroom spaces and compromise the Waiting Hall area, making the
interior as a whole unreadable as a former courthouse.
There’s no doubt that any historic building has to earn its
own keep. In this case, the current
scheme prioritises commercial necessity above historic integrity.
Some parts the Old Town Hall complex, especially the 1955
extension, lend themselves to radical alteration because their historic value
is inconsiderable.
The earlier interiors, dating back to the nineteenth century
with some later alterations, need more tactful treatment.
Sheffield can boast of a number of practical, attractive, sensitive refurbished historic buildings within a couple of minutes’ walk of the Old Town Hall, such as the Old Post Office in Fitzalan Square and the former bank that is now the Curzon Cinema on George Street.
The Planning Committee of Sheffield City Council meets on
November 19th to decide whether to approve this application concerning a major
public building in an area of the city that’s subject to radical redevelopment.
Let’s hope that the Committee gives Mr Omu every encouragement to think again in more depth about how to revive the Old Town Hall, which deserves a better fate than to become a historic shell.
A chance feature in Lincolnshire Life in 1968 led me on my Lincolnshire Road Car Company staff bus-pass to another remote country house not far from Cadeby Hall – the Italianate fantasy of Grainsby Hall, which clearly bemused Henry Thorold in his Lincolnshire Houses book and was dismissed by Pevsner as “crazy”.
I didn’t think the place at all crazy; in fact, I rather liked it.
It was wilfully asymmetrical, with a tower over the entrance
portico and lots of stark plate glass windows which, in 1968, were largely
intact.
When I revisited by car a couple of years later, the windows
– and, I think, the door – had gone and I was free to take pictures of the shattered
and clearly dangerous interior, which included a grand octagonal drawing room
and a massive galleried staircase hall.
This Italianate confectionery dated from 1860 and was built around an earlier, eighteenth-century house.
The Haigh family has owned the Grainsby estate since it came
to William Haigh of Norland, Halifax, by marriage in 1827. In the nineteenth century the family owned
the Garden Street Mill in Halifax.
The Hall must have been a splendid place but it was occupied
by the military during World War II and fell into disrepair.
For a time it was used as a grain store, until it became
dangerous.
It quickly became beyond saving, even between the dates of
my two visits, and it was duly demolished in February 1973.
The c1820 stable block remains and is listed Grade II.
In the German city of Wuppertal, birthplace of aspirin, the town hall, the splendid Rathaus, was opened in 1900 by Kaiser Wilhelm II on the same day as the celebrated Schwebebahn.
In front of it stands the jolly Jubiläumsbrunnen fountain, sculpted by the Düsseldorf sculptor Leo
Müsch (1846-1911) to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Elberfelder Verschönerungsverein [the Elberfeld beautification club].
Müsch’s design, 11.5 metres high, carved in red sandstone,
is a glorious riot of sea gods and monsters, tritons and mermaids, topped by
the figure of Neptune.
Quite what this maritime composition has to do with a
landlocked industrial valley in the heart of North Rhine-Westphalia escapes me.
According to the English translation of the Wikipedia
article, the inauguration in 1901 caused a stir because “the figures were too
much male distinctive”.
The “form of the anatomically correctly modelled pubic region”
caused great offence, and an unknown person or persons took a hammer and chisel
to the sculpture.
The community was divided, and strong positions were taken.
The local writer Walter Bloem (1868-1951) wrote a four-act drama The Jubilee Fountain which provoked his pastor to ask him to leave the church.
The City Council eventually resolved to restore Neptune’s
masculinity, after a vehement debate about acanthus leaves.
Nevertheless, as the English translation remarks, “the scars
are still visible today”.
I didn’t notice anything outstanding when I photographed the
fountain.
When I looked closer at my photograph I recalled the lady who, when annoyed by a flasher in a Marks & Spencer elevator, remarked “Is that it, then?”
Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of William Henry Crossland (1823-1909)Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873)
When I planned my 2019 Manchester’s Heritage tour I
knew I couldn’t include Manchester’s magnificent Town Hall because it’s closed
for a five-year refurbishment.
However, there’s more to “Manchester” than Manchester, and a
tram-ride away from St Peter’s Square terminates close to Rochdale
Town Hall, smaller, but hardly less magnificent than Manchester Town Hall,
with a host of entertaining stories attached to it.
No sooner had the new borough of Rochdale elected its first
Corporation in 1856 than a sub-committee began work to provide a suitable town
hall.
The committee chairman, George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873), was
originally unenthusiastic about the project.
When the Church Commissioners eventually agreed a price for land
alongside the River Roch, Ashworth tried unsuccessfully to limit the budget to
£15,000, on the grounds that it was “…only requisite that we should have a
handsome frontage.”
An architectural competition, stipulating a budget limit of
£20,000, was won by the Leeds architect William Henry Crossland (1823-1909), a
pupil of the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott.
Despite the budget-limit, Crossland’s initial estimate of £26,510
was repeatedly augmented at the Corporation’s request. The Great Hall was increased in area to 90ft
× 56ft, and the 240ft tower was embellished with an octagonal lantern decorated
with carved trumpeting angels and surmounted by a spire supporting a solid wood
statue of St George and the Dragon by Earp of London.
Several ancient buildings were demolished and the River Roch
culverted to provide the impressive seventy-foot-wide esplanade.
Crossland provided grand public rooms, the Mayor’s suite,
administrative offices and, initially, the public library, and the west wing
was given to the fire and police departments, together with a court room and
ancillary cells and a residence for the Chief Constable.
The building is faced with millstone grit from Blackstone Edge, generously
dignified by sculpture. The fire
department, for example, was identified with the phoenix, the salamander, the
owl (symbolising watchfulness) and the dog (indicating alarm-raising). For reasons that are unrecorded, a buttress
on the porte-cochère is ornamented
with a winged pig.
The interior was no less extravagant. The entrance hall, designed as a
wool-merchants’ exchange though never used as such, has a heraldic Minton tiled
floor. The windows of the vast staircase
are filled with lancet windows showing the arms of the counties, towns and
ports with which Rochdale traded, together with the technological marvels of
the day – the steamship, the railway and the telegraph.
The Great Hall is lit by windows depicting every English monarch
from William the Conqueror to William IV, together with Oliver Cromwell as Lord
Protector; Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert are portrayed in the rose windows at each end. On the eastern wall is Henry Holiday’s fresco
of the signing of Magna Carta, and the hammer beams support carved angels, from
which originally hung chandeliers.
The magistrates’ retiring room has depictions of nine English
figures associated with lawmaking and the English constitution. The Mayor’s Parlour is decorated with the
Garden of the Hesperides, the four seasons, the months of the year and a group
of musicians. The committee room frieze
shows animals associated, in one way or another, with primitive clothing, and the
walls of the arched council chamber are decorated with a ground of bursting
cotton pods and teasels, and panels showing weaving, spinning, textile-printing,
the plants used in textile manufacture and the inventions of Kay, Cartwright,
Hargreaves and Crompton.
In No 3 Committee Room the corbels show the supporters of the Town
Hall scheme, deftly described by Colin Cunningham, in Victorian and
Edwardian Town Halls (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981): “…the architect wearily toying with a pair of
dividers and the mayor clutching his new town hall”.
By the time the Town Hall was completed in 1871, the final cost
was £154,755 9s 11d, and the Mayor, G L Ashworth, remarked that “we cannot have
beauty without paying for it.”
Dry rot in the spire was being treated when the tower burnt down in 1883. One local legend declares that the fire was deliberately started by the workmen, who feared for their own safety as they took apart the rotten structure. Another legend has it that the Rochdale fire brigade, which was stationed at the back of the building, was beaten to the blaze by the Oldham brigade.
The more modest but still impressive 191ft-high replacement was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of Manchester Town Hall, and completed in 1887.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, including a section on Rochdale, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
Former Great Northern Railway: Nottingham London Road Low Level Station
Britain’s railways are notoriously ill-organised, thanks to the Major government’s privatisation process of 1994-97, in which operating companies hired trains from rolling-stock companies and ran them on track owned by a nationalised entity. (Sir John Major himself suggested simply reviving the “Big Four” grouping of 1922, which on reflection doesn’t seem such a bad idea compared with what we’re now stuck with.)
The early railway builders quickly dismissed the idea of having independent operators running on railway lines, like the eighteenth-century turnpikes, and Gladstone’s Railway Regulation Act of 1844 provided for the possibility of nationalising the railway system even as it was being built.
But the Victorians put their faith in competition, and Britain’s railways grew willy-nilly, leading to a confusion as profound as the 21st-century British rail system.
This is evident in Nottingham, where throughout the nineteenth century two competing railway companies, the Midland and the Great Northern, ran from separate stations a short distance away from each other, on Station Street and London Road respectively.
In 1879, under the auspices of the ponderously named Great Northern & London & North Western Joint Railway, a third company, the London & North Western Railway, began running passenger services into London Road Station and delivering goods to a purpose-built station at Sneinton.
Then in 1900, a fourth company, the Great Central, built the magnificent Victoria Station, which it shared with the Great Northern, in a cutting in the centre of town.
The Great Northern built a duplicate London Road station, which they named High Level, to distinguish it from their original station, latterly Low Level, which the L&NWR continued to use for their services to Market Harborough via Saxondale Junction, Bottesford and Melton Mowbray.
This absurdity continued until 1944, when the former L&NWR trains were diverted into Nottingham Midland and the Low Level station became a goods depot.
Much of this has since been swept away. There is now only one station in Nottingham, the former Midland, though it serves trains run by three separate modern operating companies. The lines into Low Level were taken up in the 1970s, and after a fire in 1996 Thomas Chambers Hine’s imposing 1857 building was restored and refurbished as a health club.
But it’s a mistake to think that the way we run British railways in the 21st century is any more bizarre than the travellers’ chaos that the Victorians created.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
St Peter’s Parish Church, Clayworth, Nottinghamshire: Traquair murals
When I visited Drakeholes to photograph the canal tunnel my curiosity was piqued by brown tourist road-signs marked ‘Traquair murals’ because I didn’t recognise the name.
That’s because I’m neither Scots nor a fine-art aficionado.
Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) was Irish by birth, an illustrator, jewellery designer and embroiderer whose mural painting was mostly done in Scotland. Only two of her mural schemes are in England, and one of them is a couple of miles down the road from Drakeholes, at St Peter’s Church, Clayworth.
The church itself is interesting – built in the twelfth century, restored in 1874-5 by John Oldrid Scott, Grade I listed.
Phoebe Anna Traquair, who married a Scots palaeontologist, was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland, and the first woman to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy,
The Traquair Murals dated from 1904-5, and were restored by Elizabeth Hirst in 1996. They were given by Lady D’Arcy Godolphin Osborne as a thank-offering for the safe return from the Boer War of her son, Captain Joseph Frederick Laycock DSO (1867-1952), of Wiseton Hall. As Joe Laycock he competed for Britain in the 1908 Olympics with his friend the 2nd Duke of Westminster.
The murals cover all four walls of the chancel, illustrating in rich colours and gilding a comprehensive figurative scheme and incorporating portraits of local children: several of the figures on the north wall, bringing gifts to the Christ Child, are members of the Laycock family, and some of the adjacent Angel Choir are actual choristers, including Tony Otter (1896-1986), who was Suffragan Bishop of Grantham from 1949 to 1965, and his cousin Jack Martin.
The murals are claimed, collectively, to be the largest artwork in eastern England.
Size doesn’t matter. They’re beautiful, and worth seeking out in this gem of a church, set in the countryside between Bawtry and Gainsborough in north Nottinghamshire.
Clayworth stands on the B1403 road south of Gringley-on-the-Hill. St Peter’s Church is open daily.
Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, Oxford Road, Manchester
The Church of the
Holy Name of Jesus, Oxford Road, Manchester, stands as a symbol of
permanence in an area that has seen huge changes since the parish was founded
in middle of the nineteenth century.
In the decade after the Great Famine of 1845-49, thousands
of Irish immigrants settled to the south of the River Medlock.
The first Bishop of Salford, William Turner (1799-1872), invited
the Society of Jesus to provide clergy for a new parish to be located in a
temporary church in Burlington Street.
This structure, named Gesù after the Society’s mother-church in Rome,
was opened on Easter Tuesday, April 4th 1868.
The foundation stone of what came to be called Holy Name Church was laid in June 1869.
The shell of the building without interior fittings cost
£14,000 and was opened on October 15th 1871.
The architect was Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803-1882), famed as the inventor of the ‘Patent Safety Cab’ that bears his name. He designed Birmingham Town Hall (designed 1831-32, completed 1861). His other major churches are Mount St Mary’s Church, Leeds (1851-57), St Walburge’s Church, Preston (1854), Plymouth Cathedral (1856-58) and Arundel Cathedral (1869-73).
Built of brick, faced with Warwick Bridge stone outside and
terracotta within, Hansom’s design is in fourteenth-century Gothic style.
The façade is asymmetrical: the baptistery with its conical roof extends to the south, and because of the street-layout the footprint is trapezoidal, so that the liturgical east end (actually north-east) is wider than the entrance. This is disguised by the layout of chapels along the south aisle, which are balanced by confessionals, each with its own fireplace, to the north.
The nave is wide, light and spacious, reflecting the Jesuit
preoccupation with preaching. The
rib-vault of hollow polygonal terracotta blocks by Gibbs & Canning Ltd of
Tamworth is supported by slender columns.
J A Hansom intended a slender lantern and spire 240 feet high with twin windows and gables, but it was abandoned for fear of overburdening the foundations.
Instead, a shorter, tapered tower was designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott (1882-1963), younger brother of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Liverpool Cathedral. It was completed at a cost of £17,000 in 1928. Its carillon of bells was dedicated on October 13th 1931.
During the ministry of Fr Bernard Vaughan SJ (1847-1922,
brother of Cardinal Henry Vaughan), the church had a powerful influence on the
surrounding community.
In the year 1900 the parish, with a population of 3,500,
registered 25 converts, 125 baptisms, 2,850 Easter Communions and 32,815
confessions. A bazaar in 1893 raised £7,350,
supplemented by a donation of a thousand guineas by Sir Humphrey Trafford, then
the owner of Trafford Park, and his friends.
In 1895 the funeral of Sir Charles Hallé took place at Holy
Name Church: the cortège reached Weaste
Cemetery four hours after the start of High Mass, which included a performance
of the Mozart Requiem and Beethoven’s Eroica
symphony.
The removal of local families to outer-Manchester housing
estates from the end of the 1920s, the upheavals of the Second World War and
the post-war clearance of the surrounding streets radically changed the setting
of Holy Name Church.
The area became a collective campus for what are now the
city’s three universities – the University of Manchester (formerly the Victoria
University of Manchester), the Manchester Metropolitan University (previously
Manchester Polytechnic) and the Royal Northern College of Music (founded by Sir
Charles Hallé as the Royal Manchester School of Music).
The Jesuits moved away in 1985 and from 1992 the church was run by the brothers of an Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. In 2003 the Oratorians moved to St Chad’s, Cheetham Hill, the mother-church of Manchester Catholics, and the Jesuits were invited back to Holy Name to run the Manchester Universities’ Catholic Chaplaincy: http://www.muscc.org.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ lecture, please click here.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
Necropolis Receiving Station, Chippendale, Sydney, Australia
Just outside Sydney Central Station stands a high-quality Gothic structure which commuters pass without a second thought.
From the street, in an area called Chippendale, it’s more obvious and impressive.
It was built as the Necropolis Receiving Station, from where funerals departed by rail to the Rookwood Cemeteryout at what was then Haslem’s Creek and is now called Lidcombe.
It was designed in Venetian Gothic style by the Colonial Architect, James Johnstone Barnet (1827-1904), a Scot who worked with the first generation of New South Wales architects – Edmund Thomas Blacket (1817-1883), William Wilkinson Wardell (1823-1899), both English, and the Canadian John Horbury Hunt (1838-1904).
Funeral trains began operating in April 1867. Passengers were required to buy return tickets, but corpses travelled free.
Though rail-borne funerals practically ended in 1938 and the mortuary station became disused, a service for mourners continued from the main Central platforms through the Second World War until the cemetery railway was closed in 1948.
The station was subsequently renamed Regent Street Station and used to dispatch animals such as dogs and horses, and later as a parcel depot, until in the late 1980s it became an unlikely and ultimately unsuccessful pancake restaurant.
Subsequently it became an even less likely wedding venue.
Church of the Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, Staffordshire: chantry chapel
The Hon Mrs Emily Charlotte Meynell-Ingram (1840-1904) was one of the richest women in England, the widow of Hugo Francis Meynell-Ingram (1822-1871), whom she married in 1863.
From her husband she inherited substantial estates in Staffordshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, amounting to 25,000 acres including Temple Newsam, near Leeds, and Hoar Cross in east Staffordshire, ten miles west of Burton-on-Trent.
Her father-in-law died in 1869, shortly after he began building a new house at Hoar Cross to replace the Old Hall. It was completed in 1871, the year that his son’s death in a hunting accident left his widow lonely and socially isolated.
Though the Mrs Meynell-Ingram preferred to spend time at Temple Newsam, she dealt with her bereavement by building Holy Angels’ Church at Hoar Cross, within a short walk of the Hall, so that her husband’s remains could be transferred from the parish church at Yoxall.
Mrs Meynall-Ingram resolved from the outset to entrust the entire design of her church to a single architect.
Her choice, George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907), remained with the project from the initial commission in 1871 until the end of his life. Indeed, the only part of the church that he didn’t design, the narthex, is his own memorial designed by his assistant and successor in the practice, Cecil Greenwood Hare (1875-1932).
Bodley had previous experience of working for a single lady patron with an open cheque-book: he had designedSt Martin-on-the-Hill, Scarboroughin 1861-2 for Miss Mary Craven, the daughter of a Hull surgeon.
He and his business partner Thomas Garner (1839-1906) certainly worked together at Hoar Cross, though Bodley seems to have taken a lead.
Holy Angels’ is an essay in the Decorated style of fourteenth-century English Gothic and is regarded as one of Bodley’s best churches.
The church is oriented to the south, so that daytime sun streams through the six-light east window.
The nave has a timber roof, while the significantly taller east end is elaborately vaulted. These features combine to make the sanctuary a dramatically lit, mysterious space, its sanctity preserved by Bodley’s ornate iron screen.
In 1888, when the Old Hall was opened as a boys’ orphanage, Mrs Meynell-Ingram decided the church was too small and commissioned Bodley to take down the west wall and extend its length from two to three bays.
She added the Lady Chapel to the south of the chancel in 1891, and the corresponding All Souls’ Chapel to the north in 1901, and refloored the nave in black and white marble the following year.
And Mrs Meynell-Ingram incessantly collected artefacts to embellish Holy Angels’ when she travelled in Europe and the Mediterranean. She commissioned the Stations of the Cross copied from the Antwerp carvers Jean-Baptist van Wint and Jean-Baptist de Boeck, coloured in the sgraffito manner which she had seen in the Mariankirche in Danzig (now Gdańsk).
The Chantry Chapel contains the tombs of both Hugo and Emily Meynell-Ingram, their effigies each resting on an alabaster base under ogee arches. The effigy of Hugo Meynell-Ingram is by the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner (1825-1892).
This sumptuous church is one of the highlights of Victorian architecture, worth seeking out for its great beauty and richness.
It epitomises what can be done when piety, grief and great wealth combine with artistic excellence.
The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Pugin and the Gothic Revival’ tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, includes a section on Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, and is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Survivals & Revivals: past views of English architecture’, please click here.
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