Gobblery
The histories of architecture are full of the big names, the people who changed the course of the art and transformed our towns and countryside: the Wrens, Vanbrughs, and Gilbert Scotts. Less well known are the local practitioners, architects who did important work in a particular town or area but are generally unsung outside their local patch: men like Watson Fothergill of Nottingham, the Jearrads of Cheltenham, and Arthur Wakerley of Leicester. Wakerley was a prominent figure in his city – a Liberal, councilor, and mayor. He served as president of Leicester’s Society of Architects and as president of the Temperance Union. His many buildings in the city range from a synagogue to a number of factories, from a hotel to streets of affordable housing.
The Turkey Café in Granby Street is one of his smaller buildings, but its central position, unusual style, and rich decoration make it one of his most noticeable. Wakerley designed it in Art Nouveau style in 1900, with the odd-shaped arches and colour scheme indicating a certain Oriental influence. The decoration was done by Doulton’s W J Neatby, the ceramic artist who worked on the Royal Arcade in Norwich and the Everard Printing Works in Bristol, both previously noticed on this blog. Wakerley devised a complex façade enlivened with multifoil arches, big windows, and a bowed central section. Neatby covered the walls in green and white tiles, adding a dazzling multicoloured turkey at the very top and two three-dimensional ceramic turkeys at entrance level. He picked the café’s name out in curvaceous Art Nouveau style lettering.
When the building opened in 1901 cafés were enjoying a heyday. Leicester boasted several cafés, establishments that were celebrated by the temperance movement that Arthur Wakerley embraced. Cafés were also favoured by women. At a time when pubs were rowdy, male preserves, women lacked places that they could go safely on their own or with women friends. Cafés and tea shops (the famous ABCs run by the Aerated Bread Company, for example, and the Lyon’s Corner Houses that came slightly later) filled this gap. Many Edwardian cafés were richly decorated buildings, marketed as modern, hygienic, and chic. Leicester’s Turkey Café, with its dazzling façade, fitted this bill, and did so with considerable style.
For more about W J Neatby, see my post here.
I do like commercial applications of British Art Nouveau, I almost feel the need to go to Leicester to see this one:)
ReplyDeleteIt's a gem from the outside, although the interior has been modernized, alas. By the way, some of tile-master Neatby's interior work survives in the food hall's in Harrod's in London.
ReplyDeleteAlways one of my favourite buildings!
ReplyDeleteGorgeous. I shall seek it out.
ReplyDeleteI always thought that safe, clean, cheapish cafes for women were a brilliant idea, once women could travel out of their homes alone and meet the girls for afternoon tea. But until you see Miss Cranston's tea rooms in Glasgow, it is difficult to remember how glamorous they could be.
ReplyDeleteThe Turkey Café in Leicester looks from the outside to have been very glamorous. Do any photos survive from the original interiors?
Hels: I've not seen any photographs of the original interiors. I expect there may be images in archives in Leicester.
ReplyDeleteI remember as a child being shown the famous film Night Mail (music by Britten, words by Auden) and hearing about 'a friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's'. Much later of course I read about the Willow Tea Rooms and later still visited them. Kate Cranston was a great patron of architecture and design.
I can't match that Turkey but we have some decent stonework on the go if you want to take a look, after all its some of the stuff you show that provides inspiration.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful architecture, it's amazing what you can see when you're actually looking for it in everyday towns and cities.
ReplyDeleteLove it! What a lovely building, especially the ceramic turkeys. I wonder what today's architects would make of a brief to design a building inspired by turkeys!
ReplyDeleteThud: Very nice gate piers! Pleased that some of my stuff provides inspiration!
ReplyDeleteWartime Housewife: It's worth a look if you are in or near Leicester. And there are other joys in the city if you keep looking up - but I guess I don't need to tell you that!
ReplyDeleteWorm: Today some latter-day postmodernist would probably come up with a building shaped like a vast turkey (like those North American buildings that take the shape of ducks and the like). But I don't think it would be easy to beat this façade.
ReplyDeleteIs there a guide to that stretch of Granby Street anywhere?
ReplyDeleteIf you walk immediately past the Turkey Cafe, you don't appreciate it. But if you see it from the other side of the street (which is now very quiet of cars), it really stands out.
To the top of Granby Street in the direction of the Clock Tower, the two banks are worth a look. The NatWest is still open and you can imagine how the interior would have looked 100 years ago. You would have been going into a building that inspired confidence in the bank.
Looking across the road from the pound shop, there is some ghost signage on the buildings opposite.
Charlieman: The only guide I have seen is the paragraph in Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England volume on Leicestershire and Rutland (Granby Street is covered on page 233 of the 1984 revised edition). Pevsner says that the NatWest dates to 1869-72 and was designed by William Millican; the large Midland is from the same period and is by Joseph Goddard, a prolific Leicester architect. I may do a post on the Midland.
ReplyDeleteThank you all for your comments. The Turkey Café has many fans – and rightly so.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like something from the Ottoman Empire. The name is apt.
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