Bradford, West Yorkshire

Packing a punch

Among the merchants’ buildings of Bradford’s Little Germany, the Thornton, Homan warehouse in my previous post stands out as one of the most imposing and ornamental. I thought I’d post a slightly less ornate, but still impressive, example, now known as Caspian House but originally built as the headquarters of Delius and Company. The Delius family had lived for several generations in the German Rhineland before Julius Delius moved to Bradford to develop his career as a cloth merchant, going into partnership with Charles Speyer to form Speyer, Delius & Co in 1853. Julius is best known today as the father of Frederick Delius, who gave up a place in the family firm to become one of England’s most famous 20th-century composers. By the early 1870s, Julius was a successful businessman who could build a substantial new warehouse* on a corner site in East Parade. It was constructed in 1873 to designs by Eli Milnes (1830–99), a local architect who, with his partner Charles France, was responsible for numerous buildings in Little Germany and the wider city of Bradford.

Like several of the Little Germany warehouses, the Delius building has a corner door embellished with rich carving – a roll-moulded arch covered with carved leaves, a tympanum with a fan-like design, and scrolls filling the spandrels above. The door itself has seen better days, but its scale gives one an idea of how impressive the entrance once must have been.† The doorway is by far the most ornate part of the building and the upper floors are very plain indeed. But a considerable effort was expended on the masonry of the lowest floor, in effect a semi-basement that diminishes in apparent size because of the building’s sloping site. This masonry is made up of alternate courses of pulvinated (i.e. convex-profiled) and reeded (vertically marked) stone. This is very striking when viewed from the pavement. Because the street is narrow, it’s actually not easy to look at the upper floors without standing in the middle of the road, so, as in many Little Germany buildings, the architect concentrated on the lower levels, which are most able to make a visual impact. The geometrical designs of the wrought-iron window grilles add to the effect. From the pavement level, Mr Delius’s building packs a punch.

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* I call these buildings warehouses, although they actually also included office accommodation.

† Click on the image to enlarge it. Yes, that seems to be Mr Bean on the door. I think he is left over from a time when the building was used for exhibitions and installations.

Delius building, Bradford, lower wall detail

Bradford, West Yorkshire

Palace of commerce

Architecturally one of the most rewarding areas of Bradford is the enclave in the city centre known as ‘Little Germany’. This is a network of narrow streets lined with Victorian warehouses that were originally occupied by companies in the textile business. Many of these buildings are five or six storeys high, so they make a dramatic impression in the narrow streets; their size also makes them difficult to photograph. Many of the owners were of German heritage and sent cloth across the Channel to their homeland and to other European countries. But this was not always the case. The corner block in my first photograph was the premises of Thornton, Homan, a local firm that was proud of its extensive trading network – its goods went as far afield as America and China.

Thornton, Homan’s building is typical of the more imposing warehouses in this part of the city. They commissioned Bradford’s most prominent architectural firm, Lockwood and Mawson, to design it and it was built in 1871, towards the end of the main building phase in this district. The style is broadly Italianate, producing something of the effect of a Renaissance palazzo, with a carefully detailed ground floor, reducing amounts of ornament further up, and a heavy overhanging cornice at the top.

The doorway is the most outstanding feature. This was not only a utilitarian building for storing cloth, but also a showcase, where customers could come and inspect the wares, and so the entrance is designed to impress. As in several other buildings in Little Germany, this entrance is set on the corner, making it highly visible as you approach it. The doorway is dominated by the semi-circular tympanum above the door with its large carved eagle, a reminder of the company’s close relationship with the USA. But the rest of the entrance is a riot of carved decoration – vine leaves in the panels on either side of the entrance, classical columns next to these panels, massive blocks making up the arch above the door (partly obscured by carved swags of fruit and flowers), foliate scrolls and a coat of arms in the curved pediment above.

My lower picture also shows the way in which the ground floor walls are built with large rusticated* blocks of stone punctuated by horizontal bands carved with vermiculation.† The windows have massive blocks to the arches (smaller versions of those above the doorway) and a band of Greek key decoration lower down. Not all the Bradford warehouses were as grand or as decorative as this one – the example in the foreground is much plainer. The Thornton, Homan building shows what Bradford’s architects are builders could do with a generous budget and a client who wanted to make their architectural mark. They succeeded.

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* Rusticated: masonry with extra deep joints between the blocks of stone.

† Vermiculation, part of the vocabulary of classical architecture: carved ornament designed to make the stone look as if parts of it have been eaten away by worms.

Thornton, Homan building, Bradford, main doorway

Bradford, West Yorkshire

Victorian Cromwell

Wondering around the centre of Bradford, I spent some time staring at the huge City Hall (designed as the Town Hall in 1869 and completed in 1873), trying to take it all in. The tall central clock tower, the grand iron-gated entrance, the rows of Gothic arches, the decoration, the heraldic shields, the many of statues of kings and queens, there was so much for eye and brain to take on board. Here was a building that was the equal of other Victorian town halls I’d seen on previous northern forays – Gothic pinnacled Manchester, classically columned Leeds, for example. It may well be that the choice of the Gothic style was in part due to the wish of the town’s authorities and their architects Lockwood and Mawson to do something different from the gigantic town hall at Leeds. The influence of John Ruskin’s eloquent boosting of Gothic would also have been in influence – he had lectured in Bradford a few years earlier. The tower, modelled on Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, and the abundance of carving, certainly feel Ruskinian.

The range of architectural detail made it feel perhaps still more engaging than either Leeds or Manchester town halls, and I was absorbed in examining the statues of monarchs – Elizabeth I and Victoria at either side of the main doorway, a run of others up above, all larger than life-size,* when I became aware of a man standing next to me. ‘Can you see who they’ve put up there?’ he said, and there was surprise in his voice. ‘Well, pretty much everyone,’ I answered. He replied: ‘Look next to Charles I. There’s Oliver Cromwell. How did they get away with that?’ The man who presided over regicide and became the leader of England’s only republic seemed an odd – even outrageous – choice to my interlocutor.

Thinking about this afterwards, it didn’t seem so strange. From the late-17th to the early-19th century, Cromwell had widely been regarded as a nasty piece of work – a hypocrite who had mouthed Puritan religious views and denounced (and obliterated) the power of the monarchy, only to seize power himself and wield it ruthlessly. In the Victorian period, however, thanks in large part to the advocacy of Thomas Carlyle,† Cromwell had been rehabilitated as a sincere Protestant, whose religious beliefs had underpinned his actions, who had thwarted tyranny, and who fought, in a way Victorians could understand, on God’s side.

Whether we agree or not with Carlyle’s view of Cromwell (or the extent to which we admire the monarchs whose statues surround his) matters little. The extraordinary array of 7 foot tall statues is not just impressive. It’s an attempt to put the building and the place it represents, I think, on a footing of national importance. Let other town or city halls have statues of local bigwigs or rulers who had a specific local connection. Bradford proclaims its connection with the entire country, and through monarchs such as the prominently displayed Elizabeth and Victoria, with British imperialism and the world. So rich was Bradford’s cloth trade, and so wide-reaching, that this was a connection that was to the Victorians entirely credible.

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* They were made by ta London firm of architectural sculptors, Farmer & Brindley, who were responsible for a wide range of projects including the Albert Memorial and statues on the exterior of Manchester Town Hall.

† Thomas Carlyle’s influential Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches came out in 1845.

                                   Statue of Oliver Cromwell, centre

 

Hook Norton Brewery, Oxfordshire

As you walk up Brewery Lane in the North Oxfordshire village of Hook Norton, the road climbs slightly. Walking away from the centre of the village and towards bushes and trees, you expect to get a view of hills and fields as you reach the brow of the slope. Instead you come face to face with this most surprising building, a brewery that seems to have escaped from the fantasy-world of some Victorian industrialist, decked out with every material that its builders could throw at it, from the local orangey-brown ironstone to half-timber, lead, and slate.

The structure was the brainchild of William Bradford (1845-1919), a Victorian architect who specialized in breweries and designed dozens, all over England. They weren’t all as ornate as Hook Norton, which was built right at the end of the 19th century. A lot of the architectural features – the half-timbering, tall windows, and ornate roofs, for example – show the influence of the Queen Anne revival style that was fashionable at the time as the way to build posh houses in West London. But Bradford makes the elegant Queen Anne style his own, with a lavish supply of quirky features such as the triangular dormer windows that pop up everywhere like raised eyebrows.

In an age when industrial buildings like breweries were often designed by engineers rather than architects, Bradford was a keen advocate of breweries with architectural pretensions. He spoke with scorn about the majority of breweries, whose design was ‘entrusted to the hands of the same gentleman who provides and fits up the pipes and cocks’. This approach wasn’t good enough for Bradford, who wanted his buildings to look impressive. And he had a point. Buildings like the brewery at Hook Norton have become icons, their images proudly displayed on jugs and beer mats.

Hook Norton Brewery is big, too. What other Oxfordshire village can boast a 7-floor Victorian skyscraper? But then, breweries are often tall, because traditional brewing is a process that relies on gravity. You pump the wort (the basic mixture of water and ground malt) to the top of the building, and then it flows downward through the various brewing processes until the brown nectar emerges at the ground-floor level. Many old breweries have closed, but the one at Hook Norton is still brewing. Naturally, they still use the original 1899 steam engine to pump the wort and power the machinery that crushes the grain. Naturally, they’re still winning praise for their beer. Cheers!