Liverpool, Royal Albert Dock

 

The red and the grey

An 1840s complex of vast warehouses and numerous smaller structures around the water, the Royal Albert Dock is the masterpiece of engineer Jesse Hartley. Hartley designed it to be fireproof – the warehouses are constructed entirely of brick, stone and metal – there’s no structural timber, apart from over 5,000 beech piles sunk in the damp soil beneath on which the vast buildings rest.

The dock is so large that it’s hard to appreciate in a photograph, but a view across the water can take in the rows of mostly cast-iron orange-red Doric columns with four storeys of brick and stone warehouse space rising above them. Every so often the row of columns is broken by a broad arch, which provided extra height for cranes to operate, swinging items out of the ships’ holds and into the covered quay area. The design allows ships to birth and unload directly into the warehouses, most of the work taking place undercover in the space immediately behind the columns. Here goods unloaded from the ships could be sorted and hoisted up to the chosen storage area in the warehouse or loaded on to carts for transport elsewhere.

The brick outside walls are load-bearing, each level’s wall slightly thinner than the one below. Inside, however, the floors and ceilings (and indeed the weight of the stored goods) are supported by a grid of columns spanned by iron beams. At the top of each level, shallow brick arches span the spaces between the metal beams to form ceilings; these arches are built up to form a flat surface above, creating the floors. In adopting this layout, Hartley was drawing on the design of fireproof textile mills. He noticed that such mills sometimes collapsed because of the outward thrust of the ceiling arches, so he fitted plenty of iron tie-bars to counter this thrust.

This is a highly practical design, but it is also visually very attractive. When the docks fell out of use in the 1960s as container ships required a different kind of handling facility, various schemes were proposed to redevelop the site. Ideas to demolish the warehouses and build office towers were rejected, as was a plan to convert the warehouses into a new campus for what was then Liverpool Polytechnic. In the end, the current conversion was devised, accommodating several museums and galleries,† a variety of retail and restaurant outlets, the Beatles Story, two hotels, and other uses. Although as I write several of the attractions are temporarily closed for redevelopment, the dock still buzzes with visitors, drawn like me to this visually stunning structure steeped in British and international history. Long mays its bricks and its chunky red columns glow.

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† Tate Liverpool, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and International Slavery Museum, all currently closed for maintenance and a major redevelopment project. Anyone interested in visiting. Tate Liverpool is scheduled to reopen in 2027, but dates can shift when alterations to complex historic structures are concerned.

Liverpool, Wapping Dock

Stand-out structure

Not far from the Albert Dock, whose gatemen’s shelters were featured in my previous post, stands Wapping Dock, and alongside this dock is an even more extraordinary small building. It’s slightly later (c. 1856) than the Albert Dock shelters, and stands by the site of the Wapping Dock’s entrance gates. It’s variously described in Joseph Sharples’ Pevsner City Guide to Liverpool (2004) as a policeman’s lodge and in the listing description online (c. 1975) as a gatemen’s shelter. Given the more recent date of the Pevsner guide, I’m inclined to accept its verdict, reinforced, to my mind, by the extraordinary architecture. The tall, spire-like roof seems to answer the old question, ‘Why can you never find a policeman when you need one?’ with a very visible point of contact. A reader has been in touch (see Comments section) to point out that the 1849 large-scale OS map marks two ‘Policeman’s huts’, one at either end of the dock. I think we have our answer.

If the tall roof and the unusual oval plan make this building stand out, so does the irregular stonework, laid like very high quality crazy paving, like the cyclopean masonry in my previous post. Other notable features are the horizontal protruding bands and the peculiar cross motif visible in my photograph. This cross is not unlike an arrow loop of the kind found in medieval castles, enabling an archer within to shoot at enemies outside. But this castle detail is very much an ornamental allusion to the old style of building – it’s not an actual opening and the lower part of the cross is not straight, but ends in a slight curve, diminishing in width as it tapers down.

Apparently this striking lodge or shelter once formed a central pier of a two-section gateway, making the visual reference to castle gatehouses and defensive architecture relevant in a way. The stone – tough granite – is also good for a gate or entrance. No wooden cartwheel, passing through, would do much damage to this hard stone. It must have done its job well, this tiny tower, eccentric as it looks.

Liverpool, Royal Albert Dock

Small structure, giant stones

On a visit to Liverpool recently, I was very taken with the docks, the Royal Albert Dock in particular. Its imposing and innovative structure deserves at least one post of its own, but before I get there, a post or two about some of the smaller dock buildings, no less meticulously designed and built than the vast warehouses nearby. My first example is one of three dock gatemen’s shelters built in 1844 to designs by the Albert Dock’s engineer and designer, Jesse Hartley.

The shelters are not large – there’s just enough room for a small group of men to gather and shelter before rushing out to open or close the dock gates, do maintenance work on the docks and their gates and bridges, light the dock’s lamps at night, and so on. Inside was a fireplace and some wooden benches and not much else. The octagonal plan with windows facing different ways enabled those inside to keep a good watch on what was going on nearby.

Hartley was an innovative designer who took his ideas from many different sources. Here he specified Scottish granite, one of the toughest stones anywhere and a costly choice; it needed bringing all the way from Scotland and it was hard to work. Nevertheless, Hartley’s masons did a good job of working the stone to a smooth surface and laying it in the ancient Greek manner known as ‘Cyclopean’*, with very large rectangular blocks at the corners and smaller, irregularly cut pieces filling in the space in between. The roof is made of the same stone, cut into enormous slabs, laid stepwise, and supported by the stout walls and fancy stone brackets (referencing oriental pagodas) at each corner.

What a lot of skill and effort devoted to such a small building in a place where some dock companies might have made do with a cheap wooden hut. The result is something beautifully made that is still, some 180 years after is was constructed, almost as good as new. Hats off to Jesse Hartley, his masons, and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board for their parts in the shelters’ creation, and to National Museums Liverpool for their informative display in one of the huts.

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* After the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants of Greek mythology, most familiar to readers of Homer’s Odyssey. Cyclopean masonry is normally made of very large stone blocks (as if only giants could handle them), with some if not all of irregular shape (suggesting the primitive skills of the giants). There is nothing primitive, however, about the masonry in Hartley’s shelters. 

London, Marylebone Lane

 

The pub on the corner

Corner sites are favourites for any business that relies on walk-in trade – shops of course, but also pubs. I passed this glowing example on a recent walk from New Bond Street to a meandering, roughly northwestward drift along Marylebone Lane. Every so often the narrow lane opens out at a crossroads or junction and here, at the corner with Bentinck Street was an ideal inn site, with an attractive looking pub catching the afternoon sunlight in pole position.

It’s the Coach Makers Arms, named in honour of a trade once prevalent hereabouts in Marylebone and, as opposed to the only vaguely Jacobean revival architecture of the shop in my previous post, it represents something from the same period (in this case 1901), in a free but more obviously Jacobean style. The early 17th century influence makes itself felt in the proportions of the windows (but not the sashes on some of them); the curving pediment at the top of the Bentinck Street frontage, with the little architectural flourish that pops up at the very top; the entrance canopy with the chubby baluster columns that help to support it; and the flourish of ornament in low relief on the corner of the building above the ground-floor window.

The use of red brick with stone dressings is typical of many buildings in this part of London, so the pub very much looks at home. There was evidence as we passed that there were still plenty of people drinking there at around 4 p.m., sometimes a quiet time after the lunchers have departed and before the after-work early doors trade begins. In this time of challenges for pubs, in terms both of architecture and hospitality, it seems as if this one is getting something right.

London, New Bond Street

 

Free style

A stroll through the gallery and couture retail area around New Bond Street throws up various architectural delights. Here’s just one example spotted on a London visit the other day, sticking out elegantly and self-consciously between a couple of more sober buildings. A neat group of stone-mullioned windows is caught between a large flattened arch that embraces both ground and first floors and a curvy gable that stands out between the flat-topped structures on either side. There’s also quite a bit of carved ornament – looping vines and tendrils, bunches of grapes and so on, all done in creamy Bath stone.

One of the curious things about this sort of building of the early years of the 20th century is that architectural historians find it difficult to put a precise stylistic label to it. Pevsner* goes for ‘free Jacobean’, taking his cue from the mullioned windows and the gable; the listing text describes it as ‘free late Gothic’, perhaps reflecting the double-curving ogee shape of the big arch. The common element in these two descriptions is ‘free’. This was a moment in architecture around 1900–1910 when architects (here Treadwell & Martin) broke away from the Victorian fashion for reviving past styles (aiming in many cases for a kind of ideal version of the past), going instead for something more original. So I see elements of Art Nouveau here alongside the Jacobean windows, in the ornament, in the tall, narrow gable, and in the double curve of the ogee arch, especially the way in which at its top it merges with the flowing ornamental vines. The number in the apex of the arch is also done in an elongated and curvy style that’s typical of Art Nouveau.

There’s something unbuttoned and celebratory about this building, which does things differently from its more straight-laced neighbours – Pevsner catches this feeling in his account of the building on the corner, which represents a ’sobering up after the Edwardian party’. That’s right, and the plain frontage to the left allows its elegant neighbour to shine.

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* By Pevsner here, I mean the revised volume in the Buildings of England series, London 6: Westminster, by Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Framlingham, Suffolk

Show of strength 

Framlingham Castle looks very impressive as you approach it from the town. Today the entrance is along a path bounded by hedges, across a small 16th century bridge over a defensive ditch, and through the gatehouse. The main defensive element is the stout curtain wall, punctuated by 13 rectangular towers. Inside, built against the walls were the main accommodation buildings including a chamber block and chapel of which only fragments remain.

The defensive walls look strong, as well they might, because they were home to the Bigod family, earls of Norfolk and in the 12th and 13th centuries probably the most powerful family in Suffolk. Hugh Bigod was famously astute at changing sides during the civil war that erupted in the 12th century between the two rival claimants to the throne, Stephen and Matilda. However, when Henry II became king, he sought to curtail Hugh’s power, took over the castle, and dismantled it…although he finally gave the estate back to Hugh. Hugh’s son Roger rebuilt the outer walls of the castle, probably completing them by 1213, when King John stayed at Framlingham.

Although the walls and towers certainly look the part, the towers are not as substantial as they seem from outside – they are open at the back and most have no inner floors for accommodation, just an upper wooden bridge to allow defenders (and now visitors) to walk along the upper part of the walls. They would, though, have provided defending arches with a useful vantage point from which to observe, and shoot, approaching enemies. Another showy feature was added later. A number of the towers have particularly ornate tall chimneys. These were added in the 15th century, by which time the Bigod line had died out and the castle was held by the Dukes of Norfolk. My photograph shows three chimneys, though there are several more. Hardly any of them were ever connected to fireplaces – the towers, after all had no rear walls. They seem to have been there primarily as rather superficial status symbols. ‘We live in the lap of luxury here,’ they seem to say.

We are used to thinking of castles as military buildings, built to be as strong as possible for defensive reasons, and devoid of anything approaching comfort, let alone luxury. According to this view, if a castle bore status symbols, they’d come in the form of defensive bells and whistles – an extra-strong drawbridge, perhaps, or a supersized moat. The towers at Framlingham could be said to fall into this category. But the chimneys are different, speaking of an image of comfort and sophistication. The more work is done on castles, the more this sort of thing emerges – some castles had not just vast banqueting halls, but elaborate gardens, for example. A castle was a home as well as a fortress.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

 

Occasional haunts, 2

I often stroll around Cheltenham, admiring its Regency architecture (terraces, crescents and squares of stone or stucco-clad houses especially). This heritage reflects a heyday in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when people flocked to the town to visit its several spas and take the waters in the hope of curing a variety of ills. However, the town remained prosperous in the Victorian period, when health tourism was supplemented by education (Cheltenham became home to several public schools) and by its popularity as a place to which to retire (it was a favourite of army officers, colonial administrators and their families). The public schools were not for everyone, and many local-authority schools were built in the late-19th century.

One of these, now converted to apartments, was All Saints’ School, built in hard, mass-produced brick with Dutch gables and big windows, in the style of many a London board school. The architecture is enlivened by architectural terracotta – i.e. clay cast to produce decorative or other designs, a material that was becoming very popular when the school was built in 1890–91. By this time, terracotta faces, sunflowers and foliage were appearing all over fashionable houses. On the school, this material was used to produce signs denoting the separate entrances for boys and girls (photograph below), and for highlights such as capitals atop the brick pilasters that ran up the building, enlivening the expanses of brickwork (above).

My favourite piece of terracotta decoration on this building combines acanthus leaves and scrolls with human faces and vases of flowers. Ornaments like this could be bought from stock from manufacturers in certain towns where bricks were produced – Ruabon, Tamworth and Loughborough, for example. Elaborate bespoke ornaments could be ordered individually, but examples like this, where the architect and builders would have been working to a tight budget, would probably have been selected from a manufacturer’s catalogue, just like those used on many streets of middle-class housing. Perfect for a lesson in the interest of looking up, even at a familiar building.