Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

Cuthbert Brodrick in Leeds 2

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Leeds Corn Exchange

Cuthbert Brodrick’s design for the Leeds Corn Exchange (1860-2) responded to a brief to provide facilities for merchants to sell their corn both by sack and by sample, which required considerable floor space and an abundance of natural light.

By his design for Leeds Town Hall (1853-58) he had already proved his ability to provide pomp and circumstance in his public buildings.  In his Corn Exchange design he displayed virtuosity and an outstanding talent for engineering innovation and precision.

The site was awkward, lying between the White Cloth Hall and the Assembly Rooms.  Brodrick’s design is unusual, a heavily-rusticated ellipse with two semi-circular entrance porches and a shallow dome overall, but it’s not original.  It harks back to the circular Parisian Halle aux Blés (1763-67) which was given a dome in 1811, and which to some extent inspired the Prince Regent’s stables in Brighton (1803) and the London Coal Exchange (1846-49).

The elliptical, domed exterior is utterly different from any other building in Leeds, its heavy masonry emphasised by diamond rustication derived from the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara (1493-1503).

Within, the walls provide offices on two levels, with a central space top-lit by an oculus and a balcony at first-floor level.  The additional roof-light on the north-east side was added in 1915.  

The basement was designed to be accessible to carts to facilitate sack deliveries, but at first it was used as the headquarters of the borough fire brigade.

The dome with its complex geometry is an exceptional piece of engineering, necessary to provide an uninterrupted space for trading and indirect sunlight for merchants to judge the quality of grain accurately. The roof-ribs are riveted wrought iron, overlaid with timber and slate, springing from opposite sides of the ellipse.

Because of its excellent connections by waterways and railways, Leeds became an important centre for dealing in grain and flour, and in 1901 the Corn Exchange had 160 regular traders, including thirty from Hull and nine from Liverpool.  The area around the Exchange became crowded with warehouses and flour mills, and across the city there were larger roller mills and manufacturers of milling machinery.

Tuesday was the regular day for corn trading, and a leather market began in 1903.  The building was at various times used for farmers’ markets, and for dog, cat, mouse and bird shows.  In 1969 two hundred traders met weekly to do business on Tuesdays between 10.00am and 2.00pm.

If Colin Buchanan’s 1973 road-building proposals had been fully implemented the Corn Exchange would have been demolished.  In the same year the Leeds Civic Trust proposed converting it to a concert hall, but the tenants objected strongly and the idea was dropped.  Instead, the building was left to deteriorate in increasingly shabby surroundings for the following fifteen years.

Eventually, in 1988, Leeds City Council awarded a 999-year lease to Speciality Shops PLC with permission to convert the Corn Exchange to a high-end shopping centre, respecting the integrity of Cuthbert Brodrick’s design and continuing to accommodate the twenty-five remaining corn-traders.  It reopened to the public in 1990. 

The ground floor trading area was opened up so that the basement became integral to the domed space above, connected by staircases with bannisters that exactly reproduced the original railings.

A small number of corn traders continued to meet, using their original stalls, until around 1994.

The lease was transferred in 2005 to Zurich Assurance, which embarked on a £1.5 million refurbishment which required the eviction of the existing tenants for work to take place.  The Corn Exchange reopened in 2007, as “a boutique shopping centre for independent retailers”, now under the auspices of the property company Rushbond, which acquired the lease in 2017.

Cuthbert Brodrick in Leeds 1

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Leeds Town Hall

One of the remarkable features of British architecture in the early Victorian period is the optimism with which sponsors allowed talented young men in their twenties to take on huge projects that have since stood the test of time.

The best-known example is Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1814-1847), who was awarded the commission for Liverpool’s St George’s Hall, after winning not one but two successive architectural competitions at the ages of twenty-five and twenty-seven.

The Hull-based architect Cuthbert Brodrick (1821-1905) was propelled to fame after he won the competition to design Leeds Town Hall in 1852 when he was barely thirty.

Despite some opposition within the Leeds borough council, the drivers of the Town Hall project aimed to outclass two public halls, both called St George’s Hall, in other major towns:  Bradford’s (1849-53) was simply a concert hall;  Liverpool’s building (1841-54) linked assize courts with a magnificent concert hall.  The Leeds scheme was intended to provide a public hall and courts combined with police headquarters and municipal offices and a mayoral residence – at a cost less than housing these functions in smaller separate buildings.

Indeed, Brodrick was initially kept on a tight leash by a contractual condition that he would not be paid if the cost exceeded £39,000, except in unforeseen circumstances or unless the council required additional facilities – which they almost immediately did.

Once the council was committed to the project there were repeated additions to the specification, including a huge pipe organ and an unforeseen tower.  The eventual cost of the completed Town Hall reached £122,000, and it seems to have been considered money well spent.

Cuthbert Brodrick made no apologies about aiming for quality.  There were furious arguments between him and the contractor, Samuel Atack, who went bankrupt in 1857.  Brodrick was heard on one occasion to urge “never mind if the quantity should exceed the contract”.

When Queen Victoria opened the Town Hall in 1858 she and Prince Albert were greeted on Woodhouse Moor by 26,809 Sunday School pupils with 5,301 of their teachers (controlled by signalmen brandishing boards), four companies of the 22nd Regiment of Foot and the 18th Hussars commanded by the Assistant Adjutant-General and 21,150 members of local Friendly Societies each wearing white gloves and a laurel-leaf buttonhole. 

Mr Trant, a chemist of Park Lane, went so far as to perfume the air outside his shop.

Prince Albert accompanied Brodrick to the top of the partly-completed tower and “entered freely into conversation on the subject of the building”:  “When I first saw the building, Mr Brodrick, I said to the Queen, ‘Magnificent! magnificent! beautiful proportions!’”

Leeds has never looked back.

Neither did Brodrick.  He seems only to have built big and almost entirely within Yorkshire.  He gave Leeds the Corn Exchange (1860-62) and the Leeds Institute of Science, Art & Literature (now the Civic Theatre, 1865-68).  In Scarborough he built the Grand Hotel (1863-67) which dominates the South Bay, and in Ilkley he designed the Wells Hydro (1854-56).

Yet he failed to win competitions or secure commissions for Preston Town Hall, the Queen’s Hotel, Leeds, the Liverpool Exchange, the remodelling of the National Gallery in London, the Manchester Royal Exchange, Manchester Town Hall and Bolton Town Hall. 

Nevertheless, he seems to have made enough to retire in his late forties.  He gave up architectural practice in 1869, and lived in Paris and later Jersey until his death, aged 83, in 1905.

Liverpool’s cultural learning zone

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Liverpool Central Library: atrium

Photo: © Christopher Brook

When Harvey Lonsdale Elmes’ St George’s Hall was completed in 1854 it brought dignity to the untidy area known as Shaw’s Brow around St John’s Church and St John’s Market (both now demolished), and the building contractor Samuel Holme proposed that its setting should become a kind of forum “round which should be clustered our handsomest edifices, and within the area of which our public monuments ought to be placed”.

The steep gradient which falls away from the site of the Hall precluded any kind of enclosed space, so the donor of the Free Library and Museum, the merchant, banker and politician William Brown (1784-1864), gave the strip of land on which was laid the street that now bears his name.

Initially, the Free Library and Museum (1857-60) sat alone towards the bottom of the hill.  Its imposing Corinthian portico complements St George’s Hall opposite. The grand entrance steps came later, c1902.

The Library was extended by adding the Picton Reading Room (Cornelius Sherlock 1875-79), an impressive galleried rotunda, modelled on the British Museum reading room in Bloomsbury.  It’s an inspiring place to read or study, and it has an entertaining echo that transmits conversations from the opposite side of the great space.  Its column-free basement, originally a lecture theatre, is now a versatile and attractive children’s library.  The semi-circular external façade pivots a bend in the street-line and responds to the apsidal end of St George’s Hall. 

Later still, behind the William Brown Street buildings, the Hornby Library (1906) was built to a dignified design by the City Architect, Thomas Shelmerdine. It now exhibits the Library’s rare books collection.  It’s noted for displaying the only publicly-displayed copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-38) that is regularly turned from page to page.

These two extensions are named respectively after the pioneer of the city’s public libraries, Sir James Picton (1805-1889) and the merchant and bibliophile Hugh Frederick Hornby (1826 -1899) who bequeathed his book-collection and £10,000 for a building to house it.

The Library and Museum were badly damaged in the May 1941 Blitz though most of their collections had been removed, and reinstatement took until the end of the 1960s with a further extension in 1978.

The rebuilt facilities did not wear well, and the increasing demand for digital resources eventually required a radical refurbishment, safeguarding the Grade II*-listed Victorian structures.

The resulting design by the Austin-Smith:Lord practice is open plan, transforming the usefulness of the building with a dramatic atrium topped by a glass dome and above all a roof terrace.  It reopened to the public in 2013.

The potential uses of the Central Library complex are virtually limitless, from school homework to academic research, to online business support and keep-fit for over-sixties.

I called on the Archives service to provide the last visit on the last day of the last Interesting Times tour, Unexpected Liverpool (June 6th-10th 2022).

The Archivist, Jan Grace, and her colleague Carl gave a tour of the Victorian spaces and showed us the comprehensive collections in the third-floor Local Studies area, all of which are freely available on open shelves.

Because we’d spent the week touring odd corners of Liverpool’s history, I’d asked Jan to provide a display in the Search Room of archives relating directly to the buildings we’d visited, from the Atlantic Tower Hotel where we’d stayed to such places as the Florence Institute, the Park Palace Ponies, the Lister Drive Old Swimming Baths and more Gothic churches than you could shake a stick at.

I was particularly grateful to have this exceptional opportunity as a grand finale to my tour programme, which has always aimed for the “Heineken effect”, visiting places that other tours can’t reach.

Liverpool Central Library: Archives Search Room – Unexpected Liverpool tour, June 10th 2022

Photo: © Jan Grace

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Boar’s Head

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33-35 Eastcheap, London EC3

As I propelled my unco-operative wheelie suitcase from Monument Underground Station, down Eastcheap to the Premier Inn, I noticed a peculiar Gothic Revival building on the opposite side of the road.

Indeed, I couldn’t help noticing it.  It shouted at me.

I’m indebted to two well-researched blog articles by Katie Wignall [About Look Up London Tours – London History Blogger & Blue Badge Guide] and Metro Girl [33-35 Eastcheap | This former Victorian vinegar warehouse is far from sour | Memoirs Of A Metro Girl] that showed me the depth of interest of this remarkable façade.

33-35 Eastcheap was designed by a rogue Victorian architect, Robert Lewis Roumieu (1814-1877) and built in 1868 for the Worcester-based vinegar manufacturers Hill & Evans.

Alongside the mostly serious Gothic Revival architects of the nineteenth century from A W N Pugin and George Gilbert Scott to George Frederick Bodley, the occasional “rogues”, such as Samuel Sanders Teulon and R L Roumieu, are more fun.

Architectural writers’ comments about 33-35 Eastcheap range from “remarkable and dramatic” (the English Heritage Grade II* list-description), to Nikolaus Pevsner’s “one of the maddest displays in London of gabled Gothic”, “the City’s masterpiece of polychromatic Gothic self-advertisement” (Gavin Stamp and Colin Amery) and “the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare” (Ian Nairn).

The riot of arcades, canopies and dormer windows is further enlivened by carved heads and animals, including the winged lion of St Mark and a boar’s head.

The boar’s head is significant, because it’s a reminder that this is the site of the medieval Boar’s Head Tavern, which William Shakespeare frequented and immortalised as the setting for the scenes between Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff in King Henry IV, Part 1.

This connection links with two of the carved heads which represent King Henry IV and his son, King Henry V.

The inn that Shakespeare knew perished in the Great Fire of 1666, and its much-altered replacement was demolished in 1831 to make way for a widened approach to John Rennie’s new London Bridge.

Roumieu’s jazzy façade captures this history in the details of this fortissimo office and warehouse that most of us would miss.

Anhalter Bahnhof

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Anhalter Bahnhof ruin, Berlin, Germany

When you emerge from the Berlin S-bahn station, Anhalter Bahnhof, you’re confronted with the vestigial remains of the late nineteenth-century inter-city main-line terminus of the same name, a reminder of a different Berlin that’s largely disappeared.

The earliest railways to reach Berlin each terminated at their own station – Postdamer Bahnhof (1838) from Potsdam and the Anhalter Bahnhof (1839) from Anhalt.   These were followed by the Frankfurter Bahnhof (1842), the Stettiner Bahnhof (1842) from Stettin (now Szczecin) and the Hamburger Bahnhof (1846-47).

The Berlin rail system went through frequent and radical realignments during the nineteenth century and the original Anhalter Bahnhof was completely and magnificently rebuilt in 1876-80 to the designs of Franz Heinrich Schwechten (1841-1924) as a major terminus under an iron-and-glass trainshed, said to be the largest in continental Europe though smaller than St Pancras.

The bombastic glazed brick façade was decorated with sculptures — figures representing Night and Day by Ludwig Brunow (1843-1913) flanking the clock, and International Traffic by Emil Hundrieser (1846-1911) crowning the central pediment.

Albert Speer’s 1930s scheme for a world capital [Welthauptstadt] called Germania to celebrate the anticipated Nazi victory in the Second World War would have severed the approach tracks to the station, which Speer proposed to convert into a swimming pool.

After the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 inaugurated the Final Solution plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Anhalter Bahnhof, unlike the other Berlin stations that transported Jews in freight wagons, provided ordinary carriages with armed guards, attached to scheduled services, to give the impression that elderly Jews were being taken to a well-deserved retirement.  

The terminus was practically put out of action by Allied bombing in November 1943 and February 1945, and although the Allies restored services from 1946, the East Berlin authorities took a dim view of trains from East Germany arriving at a terminus in the American sector, and diverted all traffic to the Ostbahnhof in 1952.

The station stood empty and unused until 1960 when most of it was demolished.  In response to public protests the central portion of Schwechten’s façade was retained and cleaned.  Brunow’s statues were replaced by reproductions so that the originals could be shown at the German Museum of Technology built on former railway land nearby.

The footprint of the station platforms and tracks is occupied by an all-weather football pitch and a concert venue, Tempodrom.  Alongside, a vast bunker constructed as a shelter in 1943 houses the Berlin Story Museum, an exercise in dark tourism from which no-one emerges feeling cheerful, telling the story of twentieth-century Berlin warts and all:  www.dark-tourism.com/index.php/germany/15-countries/individual-chapters/230-anhalter-train-station-ruins-and-bunker.

Gladstone’s Library

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Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, Flintshire

It’s not everyone’s choice of holiday, but a couple of times a year I like to book myself into comfortable accommodation some distance from home, take my laptop and a couple of paperbacks and spend the better part of a week writing.

It’s my opportunity to write up Sheffield local-history material that will never justify the expense of publishing, but can rest in the Archives as a legacy for future researchers.

Before the pandemic I spent an enjoyable, crisp winter week at the Raven Hall Hotel at Ravenscar in North Yorkshire, followed the same summer by a heatwave on the North Norfolk coast at Sea Marge Hotel in Overstrand where I found a cool, shady corner of the north-facing patio.  At both locations I hardly left the premises all week.

The pandemic prevented me taking up my booking at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, Flintshire, until March 2022, and it was worth waiting for.

The library was founded in 1894 by the Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) to “bring together books which had no readers with readers who had no books”.

He endowed it with £40,000 start-up capital and twenty thousand of his own books, which he transported in a wheelbarrow from his home, Hawarden Castle, to a temporary building, assisted only by his valet and one of his daughters.

After his death £9,000 was raised to build the present building, designed by the distinguished Chester architect John Douglas (1830-1911), and the Gladstone family provided a residential wing which opened in 1906.

No other British prime minister has a memorial library, though the USA has a tradition of presidential libraries back to George Washington.

John Douglas provided a galleried library which, apart from its visual appeal and vast collection of books, has two welcome attributes – a strict silence rule and the facility to reserve a work-place throughout the day and keep it overnight.

The residential rooms are small but comfortable, and during the pandemic all have been fitted with en-suite bathrooms.

The restaurant, Food for Thought, provides breakfast, lunch and dinner, and refreshments throughout the day, 8.00am-8.00pm.

In four days, I produced seventeen thousand words about the parish of St Cecilia, Parson Cross, Sheffield and its remarkable first vicar, Richard Roseveare.

I wouldn’t have accomplished that at home, having to cook my own meals and load my own dishwasher.

Booking details and other information can be found at Gladstone’s Library | the UK’s finest residential library (gladstoneslibrary.org).

What’s not to like?

Exploring Canberra: St John’s Church, Reid

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St John the Baptist Church, Reid, Canberra, Australia

Having visited the one building in Canberra I’d specifically come to see, All Saints’ Church, Ainslie, I looked for the obvious tourist sites like the National Gallery and the National Museum of Australia and the obscure, unlikely places that often prove to be more interesting.

I enjoyed, for instance, the National Museum of Australia, not least for the excellent salmon sandwich and pot of tea overlooking the West Basin of Canberra’s enormous artificial lake.  Like the National Maritime Museum in Sydney, entry is free and the standard of presentation is top-quality.  It supplemented my learning in a number of ways, not least because it displays an example of the gold-diggers’ wooden cradle which I’d read about and couldn’t visualise.

I’d decided to pursue my trail of buildings by the architect Edmund Blacket (1817-1883), who had built, amid much else, St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney and some of the minor churches I’d spotted in Sydney and around Maitland and Morpeth, New South Wales.

I spotted that Edmund Blacket built the 1865-70 tower to the older Church of St John the Baptist, Reid, consecrated in 1845, sixty-odd years before Canberra was even thought of. 

There’s a photograph of it c1864 with an earlier tower, surrounded entirely by flat fields.  It’s the oldest building in the area, with a narrow nave and chancel because the original cell was small and has been three times lengthened.  It has the warm, modest atmosphere of an English parish church.  Edmund Blacket’s tower and spire of 1870 sits neatly at the end of the 1841-45 nave, and the chancel is 1872-73. 

The walls are worth reading.  One panel alerted me to the existence of an abortive St Mark’s Anglican Cathedral project, for which the federal government provided a site at Rottenbury Hill in 1927, though nothing has yet been built. 

There is also a monument to the first minister of St John’s, Rev G E Gregory, who was drowned on August 20th 1851 “while attempting to swim across the Queyanbean [River] on his return from ministering to the scattered colonists on the banks of the Murrumbidgee”. 

Outside in the churchyard, the so-called ‘Prophetic Tombstone’ to Sarah and George Webb has as its inscription Hebrews 15:14 – “For here we have no continuing city, but seek one to come”.

Petre Street Primitive Methodist Chapel

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Petre Street Primitive Methodist Chapel, Sheffield (1977)

In 1977 I made a point of photographing the demolition of the magnificent All Saints’ Church, Ellesmere Road, Sheffield (1869) and, incidentally, took one image of the nearby Petre Street Primitive Methodist Chapel (1869).

I knew nothing of its history;  I simply thought it looked attractive, surrounded by boarded-up terraced houses that were clearly going to disappear.

Petre Street was the largest Primitive Methodist chapel in Sheffield:  its main hall seated 1,250 and its site on a steep slope provided room for a schoolroom, institute and classrooms in addition.

It had a troubled inception.

Sited on what was then the outskirts of Sheffield, it stood on a bleak hilltop overlooking the burgeoning steelworks in the Lower Don Valley below.

During construction a storm blew away the roof in November 1867, and the contractor repaired the several hundred pounds’ worth of damage.  This was completed on Friday February 7th 1868, when the beginning of another storm obliged the workmen lash themselves to the scaffolding to avoid being blown off.

This second storm over two days and nights caused considerable damage over a wide area, including two fatalities in the centre of Sheffield.

Overnight a section of the gable end of the partly-constructed chapel fell away, and at three o’clock the following afternoon the side wall collapsed, bringing with it the roof and its timbers, filling the interior with debris and weakening the remaining side wall so that it too collapsed. 

This time the repair bill, estimated at £1,200, was the direct responsibility of the trustees, who immediately set about fundraising. 

The church was opened at an eventual cost of £5,000, with a remaining debt of £2,400, on Friday March 27th 1869.

As a community, the Petre Street Methodists lost no time.  Newspaper reports in 1869 show a relentless programme of events in addition to services – Band of Hope meetings, a sale of work, a bazaar, the oratorio Babylon and, immediately after Christmas, a tea for a thousand in two sittings, for which eight hundred tickets were sold.

The trustees’ courage and determination in surviving not one but two storms at the outset is remarkable.

At the start of the twentieth century this congregation was described by the Primitive Methodist Magazine as leading one of the most “aggressive and prosperous” Primitive Methodist circuits in Sheffield.

For a century, the two congregations, Anglicans at All Saints’ and Primitive Methodists at Petre Street, came and went each Sunday within sight of each other.

As the houses were cleared in the mid-1970s both congregations diminished.  All Saints’ had gone by the middle of 1977, and the Petre Street chapel was closed and quickly demolished in 1980, when the two churches moved together into a new building, St Peter’s, designed by the G D Frankish Partnership.

It’s an attractive design, though it lacks the impact of All Saints’ or the quieter dignity of the Petre Street chapel.

St Peter’s Church, Ellesmere, Sheffield

Thomas Hawksley’s grand designs

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Former Bestwood Pumping Station, Nottinghamshire, now Lakeside Restaurant (2021)

A pair of remarkable linked architectural experiences are to be found north of Nottingham, where two of the magnificent pumping stations associated with the Victorian engineer Thomas Hawksley (1807-1893) are open to the public.

When I first planned my Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour to take place in 2020 I couldn’t include Bestwood Pumping Station because the restaurant that occupied the building had closed.

The slightly later Papplewick Pumping Station is so important and so spectacular that I determined the date of the tour to coincide with the steaming-day programme at Papplewick, and I did exactly the same when I had to postpone the tour, first to 2021 and latterly to 2022.

By the time I did final checks for the 2022 dates – Thursday August 25th-Monday August 29th 2022 – the newly refurbished Lakeside Restaurant had reopened, providing the opportunity to enjoy both buildings on the same day, with lunch included.

When Bestwood Pumping Station was built between 1869 and 1873 the landowner, the 10th Duke of St Albans, had only recently completed his grandiose retreat at Bestwood Lodge, and His Grace specified in the lease to the Nottingham Waterworks Company that the waterworks should embellish his estate.

Consequently, the engine house is an elaborate brick essay in thirteenth-century Gothic, with a 172-foot high chimney that’s encased in a Venetian Gothic staircase tower leading to a viewing platform.  (This will be open to the public when building works are finished in due course.)

The engines were dismantled in 1968 and the empty building reopened as the Lakeside Restaurant in 1997 with a décor strongly reminiscent of Victorian country houses, later replaced by an understated colour scheme of sage green and gold.

The latest refurbishment has transformed the interior to a dramatic charcoal and white scheme with tiny touches of gold that admirably brings out the decorative detail of the Victorian structural ironwork.

Papplewick is even more ornate, and for different reasons.  By the time it was started in 1882 the Waterworks Company had been taken over by Nottingham Corporation, and their engineer, Marriott Ogle Tarbotton (1835-1887), closely followed Hawksley’s design at Bestwood.  The Papplewick project was finished below budget, so the surplus cash was spent on a riot of craftsman decoration, all on the theme of water and water creatures.

When I visited the Lakeside to update my photos, and to have lunch, my hostess Theo mentioned that she hadn’t ever visited the Papplewick Pumping Station, and she was sufficiently enticed by my friend’s videos of the engines in steam to arrange to visit the next steaming day with her colleague Katie.

They’re in for a treat, as my guests will be on next August’s tour.

To walk through the imposing front door of Bestwood Pumping for an excellent lunch, and then to drive over to Papplewick and walk through a very similar front door to witness two huge beam engines quietly turning is a profoundly satisfying contrast.

In the warm, hypnotic environment of the Papplewick engine house it feels as if the earth moves.

Bestwood is visually dramatic, and Papplewick is a multisensory theatrical experience.

Papplewick Pumping Station features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Temples of Sanitation’.  For further details, please click here.

St John the Baptist, Tuebrook

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Church of St John the Baptist, Tuebrook, Liverpool

George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907) was a major figure in the second generation of Victorian architects in Britain.

Apart from his exceptional artistic acumen, which led him to collaborate with like-minded artists in a range of media, he had two outstanding qualities.

First, he capitalised the personal connections he grew up with in Hull, where his father was a physician at Hull Royal Infirmary.  He became the pupil of the great Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878), whose uncle was the first of three successive generations to serve as vicar of St Mary Lowgate Church in Hull’s Old Town from 1816 to 1883.  Bodley’s sister married Scott’s brother Samuel, a doctor, in 1846.

One of his early commissions, St Martin-on-the-Hill parish church, Scarborough (1861-2) was financed as a memorial to her father by Miss Mary Craven, the wealthy daughter of a Hull surgeon.

Bodley had a knack of attracting commissions from wealthy patrons seeking a rich architectural expression of their High Church principles. 

Five years later, the £25,000 cost of his church of St John the Baptist, Tuebrook, Liverpool (consecrated 1870) was borne by the wife of the first vicar, Rev J C Reade.

Later commissions included St Augustine, Pendlebury, Salford (1870-1874, £33,000) for the banker Edward Stanley Heywood and Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, Staffordshire (1872 onwards, £28,500), a memorial to the late husband of Mrs Emily Charlotte Meynell Ingram.

His final, posthumously completed commission was St Chad, Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire (1905-1910, £38,000) for the brewer Michael Bass, 1st Baron Burton.

Even later than this, a decent Gothic parish church could be built from scratch for less than £8,000.

All these churches are now listed Grade I.

The current Buildings of England entry describes St John the Baptist, Tuebrook as “large, unshowy, but dignified and sensitive…a key work in Bodley’s oeuvre”.  Its exterior is distinguished by its irregular polychrome banding, and the exterior and interior proportions are at the same time dignified and simple. 

The richness of the interior comes from the fittings which Bodley and his practice partner Thomas Garner provided – the marble font and pulpit, the screens painted by Kempe leading to the choir and sanctuary, where the woodwork of the choir stalls and organ case is oak, stained black, painted and gilded, and the stained glass of the east window and the window to the south of the chancel designed by Bodley and Kempe in collaboration with William Morris. 

The reredos, also designed by Bodley, replaced the original in 1870-71, before the Bishop of Chester, Rev John Graham, would consecrate the church.  There is uncertainty about whether Bishop Graham objected to the original reredos because of suspicions that it had previously belonged to a Roman Catholic chapel, or whether Bodley had manipulated the postponement to make time for improvements to the heating system and the organ.

Bodley’s wall-decorations, painted by his assistant Charles Eamer Kempe (1837-1907), had deteriorated by the turn of the century, and Father Brockman, vicar in 1905, commented, “It costs a good deal to live up to Mr Bodley.”  After Bodley’s death in 1907 his surviving partner, Cecil Greenwood Hare, revised the decorative scheme and this was restored by Stephen Dykes Bower (1903-1994) in 1968-71.  It is now once again in need of restoration.

Bodley designed the Vicarage, built in 1890, and also, in a corner of the churchyard, a curious and little-noticed feature, the mortuary house on Snaefell Avenue.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.