Manchester, Cross Street

Steaks and ale

How good to find, in central Manchester’s Cross Street, a building that looks small but punches above its weight. It’s Mr Thomas’s Chop House, and Geoff Brandwood, in the excellent handbook Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, describes it as ‘an exuberant example of fin de siècle architecture in an ornate Jacobean style’. The walls are a mix of buff terracotta and dark red brick, and the curving bow, the mullioned windows and the elaborate gable all speak of the Jacobean revival. The front of the structure was originally a shop and offices, with the chop house behind, but now the whole of the ground floor is made over to eating and drinking – and indeed must have been so for much of the building’s history, as the interior looks unified in its decoration, down to early features such as tiles.

Looking at the details more closely, a beguiling combination of Jacobean and Art Nouveau becomes apparent. The decoration above the corner entrance, for example, combines a coat of arms topped with a helmet as crest, with a lot of curlicues: so far, so traditional. The mythical birds on either side of the coat of arms could be heraldic but also fit nicely with the Art Nouveau style. So, above all, do the heart-shaped motifs higher up, with the curvaceous bands that enclose them, which curl this way and that in a style that was highly fashionable when this building was designed in 1901.

What a delicious entrance to a chop house. But what, exactly, was a chop house? The usually definition is a pub or restaurant where the main item on the menu was meat in the form of steaks or chops. Originally, there seems to have been a sense of something downmarket about such establishments. In his great 18th-century dictionary, Dr Johnson defined a chop house as ‘a mean house of entertainment, where provision ready dressed is sold’. But by the time Thomas Studd set up in business in the 1860s, things were different. Chop houses were where Manchester’s merchants and factory owners came to meet and discuss business over a nourishing meal. As a form of pub, they were very much male-only premises in the Victorian period.

By the time the current building was put up, Thomas had died but his wife Sarah carried on the business with great success. She also transformed it by admitting women – a revolutionary move which must have caused much discussion. Many women were no doubt grateful, and this has a special resonance in Manchester, home of the Pankhursts. I have read that on International Women’s Day in 2019, the building was renamed Sarah’s Chop House in honour of Sarah Studd, but when I visited last month, the original name had been reinstated. Steaks and ale, I’m pleased to say, are still on the menu.

Manchester, Oxford Road

 

People’s palace

Taking the bus from the centre of Manchester to the Whitworth Art Gallery to save time and avoid the rain, I saw this building out of the window…and of course had to walk back to take a closer look. Manchester is full of buildings clad in terracotta, but not so many in a tasteful combination of green and cream faience that catches the eye, is in theory at least easy to keep clean, and stands out from the crowd in a way that’s an effective bit of self-advertising. Perfect of course for a cinema, The Grosvenor Picture Palace no less, its Art Nouveauish lettering announcing that for a small fee, anyone can luxuriate in palatial surroundings while enjoying the latest in cinematic entertainment.

It’s an early cinema, designed in 1913 and opened in 1915,* when the 1000-seater claimed to be the largest outside London and offered, in addition to films, the opportunity to play snooker or billiards in the basement.† The architect was a local man, Percy Hothersall, who designed several cinemas and on this occasion worked with the Middleton Fireclay Works of Leeds to produce the ceramic cladding for the building. Pilasters, swags, roundels, circular oeil de boeuf windows, and a shallow dome on the corner produce an effect of decorative classicism. It’s fairly formulaic stuff that would have been bread and butter to both the architect and the ceramics company, but it must have looked sophisticated to most of the cinema’s first customers.

Cinemas like the Grosvenor were part of a swelling tide of picture houses, which became more and more popular as the film industry got going. Architect Percy Hothersall was drawn into this trend, not only designing cinemas, but sometimes taking his fee in shares in cinema companies. He seems to have made a lot of money out of this, but apparently invested his profits unwisely, and was declared bankrupt in 1926. It’s a sad story, all the more so because the popularity of cinema-going lasted until well after World War II and a wiser investor could have continued to make profits. The Grosvenor showed movies until 1968, after which, like so many cinemas, it was used as a bingo hall before it became a pub. The eye-catching exterior is no doubt just as effective an advertisement as it originally was.

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* Cinema was barely 20 years old at this point. The Lumière brothers first demonstrated their Cinematographe in December 1895. The first decade of the 20th century saw the rapid growth of film industries in many countries.

† I’m indebted to the Architects of Greater Manchester website for information about this building and its architect.

Dennington, Suffolk

 

One foot or two?

When you hear that a church is furnished with medieval benches, you wonder what to expect. They were often an extensive canvas for woodcarvers. Bench ends alone offered vast scope for a talented carver. In the past I have noticed on this blog a bagpiper in a Cornish church and a fox dressed as a bishop in Somerset. Here’s another unusual subject from the church at Dennington in Suffolk – a mythical creature called a sciapod.* The usual definition, drawn from classical sources such as the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes (in The Birds) and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) and medieval bestiaries, describes a human figure with a single leg ending in a very large foot. The creature is portrayed lying down and using its foot as a sun shade. Its name comes from the Greek ‘shadow-foot’.

All the depictions I’ve seen show a creature with a single leg and foot. A British example is the famous medieval map of the world (Mappa Mundi) in Hereford cathedral, where these single-legged humanoids are shown in India and in the far south of the inhabited world. However, looking closely at the Dennington sciapod he appears to have a pair of legs and feet, both of the same form. This seems to make him unorthodox, but we are in the world of myth and legend after all, so why should there not be variations in iconography?

What is such a weird beast doing in a church? There are interpretations that attempt to place sciapods in the context of arguments against sin – they are ‘deformed’ beings whose bodies show the results of sin. Other writers simply saw them as monsters that we should fear. St Augustine applied the criterion of rationality – if they were capable of rational thought, he believed, they were human, have a soul, and deserve to be treated as such. Whether they’re meant to remind us of the dangers of evil, or to point out that appearances can be deceptive, or to protect us from evil spirits, or whether they were valued mainly for amusement value, like the figures and creatures drawn in the margins of many medieval religious books, they warrant our notice, and their creators command our respect.†

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* I know of only one other example in a English church, although there may be others.

† For a good account of the marginal figures in medieval manuscripts and similar images, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Reaktion Books, 2019).

Sandhurst, Gloucestershire

Warm and cool, rough and smooth

There’s something very satisfying about the warm colour of Georgian brickwork bathed in sunlight, and if the bricks have been used to build a country house of delightful proportions, so much the better – even if, as is the case at beautiful Wallsworth Hall, those proportions have been somewhat skewed by the addition of an off-centre turret and a protruding bay (in harder, later brick) on the left-hand side. But houses grow and their owners have changing ideas about what they want, and I’m happy to accept these changes as interesting bits of history, revealing developing needs and new tastes. They don’t, for me, wholly destroy the beauty of the mid-18th century original, in which old brickwork is complemented by sash windows, stone dressings, and a rather pleasing row of three circular windows to the central attic.

More recent changes have had a less obvious effect on the exterior of the house. It has been for some decades the home of Nature in Art, the first museum and art gallery dedicated to art inspired by nature. It celebrates such art (both fine and applied) through a growing permanent collection, a programme of special exhibitions covering everything from botanical illustration to wildlife photography, an artists in residence scheme, and a range of courses.

Architecturally, what particularly caught my eye, as I approached the house, was the doorway. Here too, the sun played its role, bringing out the details of the bold pediment, with its chunky dentils creating a pattern of light and shade. It’s this detail, and the extraordinary columns that are striking. Just as the sloping sides of the pediment are broken by chunks of carved stone, so the columns are raised to a greater level of decorative splendour by three cubic stone blocks, again chunkily carved, which punctuate their Roman Doric smoothness.

What these bits of carving do is take us from the rational, 18th-century mode of classical symmetry to a the world of caves and grottoes. Look at one of the square sections of the blocked column closely and you see a cluster of rock-like lumps and facets, many of which have the chisel marks clearly visible to emphasize their roughness, interspersed with what look like icicles or stalactites. It’s the sort of thing that would be at home in a grotto in the garden of a great house like Stourhead, and translates us from the balmy sunshine to the shivering sound of the aria sung by the Cold Genius in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. What a place to end up on a warm winter’s morning: delightfully different, but still contained within the classical proportions of the house as a whole.

Toddington, Gloucestershire

 

Help at hand

This AA box has appeared by the roadside a few miles from where I live. They’re a dying breed, these AA boxes, and seeing one that was new to me set me thinking about their history.

In the post-war period there were over 1,000 AA telephone boxes scattered all over the country. They were originally built to provide shelter for sentries on the staff of the Automobile Association, who could offer help and directions to passing members; they also contained telephones, from which the sentry could call for further assistance. The first boxes were installed in 1911, and by 1920, AA members were themselves issued with a key to open the boxes, from which they could call for assistance if they had broken down. Maps, a light, a fire extinguisher, and other equipment were kept in the box for members’ use.

In spite of their shortcomings for those who broke down far from a box, they proved popular. When a box was manned by a sentry, he would salute the driver of a car bearing the AA’s distinctive badge, and a camaraderie built up between sentries and members. But with the development of communications technology, the increase in vehicle reliability and other factors, the boxes fell out of use, were replaced or supplemented by more modern roadside telephones, and this whole infrastructure of members’ telephones was finally rendered superfluous by the rise and rise of the mobile phone.

There are now only 30 or so boxes, without their original telephones, remaining,* some of which are in open-air museums such as Beamish and Avoncroft. The example in my picture has been restored by the volunteers of the Gloucester and Warwickshire Steam Railway, a heritage line whose whistles I can occasionally hear from the town where I live. It was originally sited at Andoversford near Cheltenham and apparently was in seriously damaged conditioned before the heritage railway acquired it and restored it. Now it’s a welcome sight as one leaves behind the Toddington roundabout in the direction of the climb up the Cotswold escarpment at Stanway Hill, on the way to Stow-on-the-Wold. As once it would have been welcome to motorists who were lost, or in need of mechanical help, as they went their way along the local steep, curvaceous and often chilly roads.

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* A website here lists 32 survivors, of which 12 are in museums and one is at the AA headquarters at Basingstoke.

Earl's Court, London

Time machine

Why can you never find a policeman when you want one? It was in part to provide a solution to this old question that London’s Metropolitan Police Force began to adopt ‘police boxes’ in the late-1920s. Police boxes contained a public telephone (accessible from outside the box via a small door), as well as a large door to admit a police officer and to give them access to a chair, a small table, writing equipment, an electric heater, and other bits of kit. Such boxes enabled an officer to contact his local police station to summon help. A flashing light on top of the box acted as a signal to a passing officer to contact his local station. These lines of communication were invaluable in the era before personal radios (let along mobile phones), when the only other way an officer could try to get help was to blow a whistle.

The design of the box used in London was the work of Gilbert Mackenzie Trench, surveyor to the Metropolitan force. These chunky boxes, taller and larger than standard telephone boxes and made of concrete with wooden doors,* became quickly familiar, although they were not the first of their kind. The idea of a police box was first taken up in Glasgow, where tall hexagonal boxes, painted red, were used from 1891 onwards. They became ubiquitous on the capital’s streets (and in some towns outside London), until the use of personal radios became the norm in the 1960s and 1970s. The boxes had slipped from my consciousness until the other week, walking around the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea with a friend, I was surprised to find this one outside Earls Court underground station.

Because of the use of such a box as the portal to a time machine in the British TV programme Dr Who, the design is still well known, so I wasn’t entirely amazed that at least the occasional box has been preserved to pay tribute to television history as well as to the history of policing and design. However, the Earl’s Court box is actually a reproduction – according to online sources it dates to 1996. I was nevertheless still pleased to have my memory jogged. Objects that remind us of past times are time machines in their own way, taking us back…but also bringing us forward to a time when communications are easier, when they work.†

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* The original design specified a wooden structure with a concrete roof, but concrete walls were adopted for durability.

† For my musings on a mobile phone dysfunction, see this blog post.

Beverley, East Yorkshire

Independent

When my mother was a young girl, she thought all telephone boxes were cream in colour. This is because she spent her first years in the city of Hull and did not travel far beyond its boundaries, except to nearby villages and the market town of Beverley, just a few miles away. When World War II began and the then great port of Hull was subject to regular bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, my grandfather found another job and my Mum and her parents moved across the River Humber to the comparative safety of rural Lincolnshire – where the phone boxes, to her surprise, were red. ‘But they’re all red,’ said my grandmother. ‘Except for the ones in and around Hull.’

The reason for this anomaly lies in the history of British telecommunications. In the early decades of the telephone in Britain, lines and exchanges were operated by various local and national companies; some 13 town and city councils also owned their own local telephone systems. By the early-20th century, all these local-authority systems had been sold either to the National Telephone Company or the Post Office – with the exception of the one operating in Hull. So when, eventually, the Post Office took over the whole nation’s telephone system, Hull remained independent and when the Post Office adopted the standard red colour for their telephone kiosks (to match their post boxes), Hull’s retained their own shade of cream.

To those unfamiliar with this particular part of East Yorkshire, Hull’s cream phone boxes come as a surprise. As more and more boxes are removed because, now that almost everyone has a mobile phone, they are not much used, these rare cream boxes become even scarcer than they originally were. And there’s less chance for people to notice other different details – the use of a different, sans serif, letterform for the word ‘TELEPHONE”, for example, and the lack of a crown (symbolic of the Post Office) above this lettering. However, a number of cream boxes are now listed, preventing this rare breed from becoming completely extinct, so that we continue to be reminded of this particular bit of Yorkshire independence.