Category Archives: Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns

Wool barons’ Valhalla

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Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford, West Yorkshire

The best view of Bradford, sitting in its valley bottom, is from Undercliffe Cemetery, which from 1851 was the resting place of many of the great and the good of the booming wool town.

At the vantage point stands a prominent thirty-foot obelisk, commemorating Joseph Smith, the original land agent for the Cemetery Company.

Swithin Anderton, a wealthy wool-stapler, lies beneath a version of the Scott Monument which Ken Powell aptly describes as “scaled down” rather than miniature.

Less luminous but no less interesting characters buried at Undercliffe include Charles R Whittle, the author of ‘Let’s all go down the Strand’, Charles Rice, “comedian…for many years lessee and manager of the Theatre Royal, Bradford”, and David Brearley, an official of the United Ancient Order of Druids whose inscription is distinguished by at least five spelling mistakes.

Undercliffe Cemetery was used as a location in the film Billy Liar (1963).

Stranded by the tide of changing economic conditions and funeral fashions since the last war, the Bradford Cemetery Company went into liquidation in 1976 and the site was purchased for £5 by a developer who went on record saying, “I was very concerned to see the cemetery had fallen into disrepair and I thought it was terrible to see the place being neglected.”

The local newspaper later alleged that inscribed kerbstones were sold for scrap stone, and Bradford City Council, spurred by the small but energetic group of the Friends of Undercliffe Cemetery, took it on in 1984, by which time the chapels and lodges had all been demolished.

Now the Cemetery is well cared for by Bradford City Council in partnership with the Undercliffe Cemetery Charity [http://www.undercliffecemetery.co.uk].  A replacement lodge was transplanted from Bowling Cemetery, Bradford in 1987.  All it needs is for someone to donate two matching Gothic funerary chapels in need of a good home.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 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.

Manningham Mills

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Lister's Mill, Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Lister’s Mill, Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Bradford, like Halifax and Sheffield, sits in a spectacular bowl of hills.  When you gaze across Bradford from Undercliffe Cemetery or Peel Park, the structure which dominates the entire cityscape is not the Town Hall or the Cathedral, but the Italianate bulk of Samuel Cunliffe Lister’s Manningham Mills (1873).

Lister, the son of a mill-owner, prospered by three successive inventions – the Lister Comb (1843), which mechanised the last remaining hand-process in the production of woollen cloth and condemned a substantial class of local independent craftsmen to penury, the silk comb (1857-65) which nearly bankrupted him in development but enabled him to turn waste silk into fabric for fashion-wear, and the self-acting dressing-frame, which gave him domination of the velvet trade.

The existing mills designed by Andrews & Pepper were built on the site of an earlier mill which burnt down in 1871.  The Italianate chimney is 225ft high and is said to weigh 8,000 tons.  This vast complex, comprising 16 acres of working floors, employed 11,000 people at its peak, but closed entirely in 1992.

For a decade the building stood empty and vandalised.  The late Jonathan Silver’s proposal to house the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia collection in part of the mill complex fell through.

Eventually, the great rescuer of great buildings in distress, Urban Splash, began to bring Lister’s Mill back to life in 2004.

The initial phase, providing 95 flats and 36 duplex apartments in the Silk Warehouse, sited around a full-height atrium to provide light and circulation-space, is designed by Latham Architects.

The second phase, Velvet Mill, by David Morley replaced the existing roof with glass and steel pods containing two-storey apartments.

The huge grass space to the west of the mill complex was once filled with dense terraced housing.  Two of the streets were named, with blunt Yorkshire gratitude, Patent Street and Silk Street.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

People with pianos

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Titus Street, Saltaire, West Yorkshire

Titus Street, Saltaire, West Yorkshire

I’ve just finished reading a recently published architectural survey of Sir Titus Salt’s mill town, Saltaire, at Shipley, west of Bradford.

The story is well-known:  Mr Salt, as he then was, chose to remove the family woollen mill from the grossly polluted centre of Bradford to a green-field site in the Aire valley, with ample supplies of clean water, canal and rail connections and space to construct a model village.  The Bradford architects, Henry William Lockwood and William Mawson, built the mill, which opened in 1853, and constructed the village in seven phases up to 1875, the year before Salt’s death.

Believing firmly in temperance, though not himself a teetotaller, Salt declined to provide a public house, saying he saw no reason to spend money on something which would damage his trade.  In Victorian times, other Shipley folk supposedly looked upon Saltaire residents as the sort of people who had pianos in their front parlours.

Saltaire is one of three major British industrial settlements that are designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites – the other two being the Derbyshire Derwent Valley Mills [see Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site] and New Lanark.  Up to the early 1970s all three were unregarded, and piecemeal demolitions threatened their integrity.  At Saltaire the magnificent Wesleyan Methodist Chapel and the Congregational Sunday School came down:  their sites are now occupied, respectively, by an undistinguished modern replacement and a public car park.

The refurbishment of Salt’s Mill after its closure in 1986 was the work of Jonathan Silver (1950-97), who had built up a fortune in retail clothing and successfully invested in a 50% share of Sir Ernest Hall’s landmark redevelopment of the Dean Clough Mill in Halifax.  His offer to develop Bradford’s Manningham Mill as a home for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia textiles collection was turned down by the City Council [see Manningham Mills].  The huge Saltaire mill building is now home to high-tech industry, high-quality shopping and a diner, a café and the 1853 Gallery, showcasing the work of the Bradford-born artist, David Hockney.

Saltaire makes an excellent day out.  Salt’s Mill [http://www.saltsmill.org.uk] is the obvious starting place:  admission is free.  The Victoria Hall & Institute [http://www.victoriahallsaltaire.co.uk] is home to Pam and Phil Fluke’s Reed Organ & Harmonium Museum and what claims to be “Yorkshire’s finest Wurlitzer Cinema Organ”.  Across the river is the Shipley Glen Tramway (though its website http://www.glentramway.co.uk still shows 2009 opening times).

On the edge of Salt’s village is The Old Tramshed restaurant [http://www.theoldtramshedbrasserie.com/images/downloads/newsletter.pdf]:  as the name implies this is a sumptuous conversion of the front end of a former Bradford Corporation tram and, latterly, trolleybus depot, with huge glass windows where the vehicles entered, and the most implausible tramlines in the world outside where the smokers indulge their addiction.

That fills a long day, and probably the evening too.

The new study of Saltaire is Neil Jackson, Jo Lintonbon & Bryony Staples, Saltaire:  the making of a modern town (Spire 2010) [http://www.spirebooks.com/salt.html].

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Hug the Odeon

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Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford (1986)

Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford (1986)

When the New Victoria Cinema, Bradford opened in September 1930 it was the third largest cinema in the UK, seating 3,318 patrons.  Designed by the Bradford architect William Illingworth, its exterior is punctuated by two domed entrance towers.  The fan-shaped auditorium, elaborately decorated with classical pilasters and friezes, is surmounted by a 70-foot diameter dome.  There was a tea lounge, a 200-cover restaurant and a high-ceilinged ballroom with its own separate entrance.

The proscenium was 50 feet wide by 35 feet high;  the stage, 70 feet by 45 feet, was equipped with a full grid and ten dressing-rooms, because in 1930 live shows were a requirement and there was no guarantee that the fashion for new-fangled, technically unreliable talkies would last.

The original Wurlitzer survived a 1946 flood, because someone had the presence of mind to park the console at the top of its lift:  it now resides in the deliberately named New Victoria Centre, Howden-le-Wear, Co Durham.

The New Victoria became the Gaumont in 1950.  At the end of the 1950s decline set in:  the ballroom closed in 1961 and the Wurlitzer was removed when the building was subdivided in 1968.  Illingworth’s auditorium was so vast that, instead of the usual practice of dropping a wall from the balcony end to create additional screens in the rear stalls, the balcony itself was divided into two screens by a vertical partition and a floor across to the proscenium, and the stalls area became a 1,000-seater Mecca bingo hall. The twinned cinema reopened as the Odeon in August 1969.  In 1988 a third screen was opened within the otherwise unused ballroom.

After the bingo-club closed in 1997 and the multiplex cinema followed in 2000 the building stood empty.  It was sold first to a developer and later to Yorkshire Forward:  both planned to demolish the Odeon completely, and repeated redevelopment schemes excited vociferous opposition led by the Bradford Odeon Rescue Group [BORG], who in 2007 arranged for a thousand people to link hands and hug the entire building.

Public-sector bodies such as Yorkshire Forward and Bradford Centre Regeneration [BCR] claimed that the building had no historical value and is deteriorating, which it might well be after a decade without active maintenance.  English Heritage has remained unconvinced that it is worth listing, and interested groups such as the Twentieth Century Society and the Cinema Theatre Association have had difficulty gaining access to prove otherwise.

In the end, it fell to urban explorers, those curious obsessive aficionados of dereliction, to provide incontrovertible evidence that the original decorative scheme remains.  The 1968-9 conversion proved to be a shell built within the original space, and the ballroom conversion simply involved installing a suspended ceiling;  Odeon Cinema, Bradford – Whatevers Left.

To see some of what remains, check –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTZ6cmoURRU&feature=related.  It’s an eye-opener.

There’s a detailed history of the New Victoria Cinema at http://www.bradfordtimeline.co.uk/newvic.htm.  The present owners of the New Victoria Wurlitzer are at http://www.netoa.org.uk.

In September 2012 the agreement with the developer who intended to demolish it fell through, prompting a fresh search for an economic solution:  http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/9941717._All_viable_options_open__after_Odeon_deal_collapses and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-20097997.

The Homes & Communities Agency, to which the building had devolved, proposed to sell it to Bradford City Council for £1, and to provide £4.1 million to secure the building.  A structural survey revealed that, after all, the building was in better condition than had previously been suggested.

Irna Qureshi’s article in The Guardian (September 21st 2012) surveys the fall and rise of the New Victoria Cinema’s fortunes:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/sep/21/bradford-georgegalloway.

A 2014 film by Mark Nicholson and Vicky Leith shows how the building revealed itself as the 1970s accretions were stripped away:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Eidel-etU.

An urban-explorer report, presumably dating from early 2017, shows the extent of the cavernous spaces inside the New Victoria waiting to be restored: http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/15377618.23_PICTURES_____Urban_explorer____photographer_gets_a_rare_glimpse_inside_Bradford_s_Odeon_building/#gallery0.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.