Liverpool, Hope Street

Listed

When visiting a city I don’t know very well, I make lists of major buildings that I want to see, but once I arrive I’m constantly on the lookout for unexpected delights – the assorted unregarded shopfronts, pubs, sheds and shelters, many of which make up the subject matter for blog posts. In Liverpool, I made a bee-line for two pubs that can hardly be described as ‘unregarded’ – they’re among the most memorable drinking-places in Britain, a must for anyone who revels in the excesses of Victorian or Edwardian architecture and decoration.

The first is the magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms, a pub so ornate that my usual blog formula of one (or sometimes two) pictures and a commentary simply isn’t enough. You can see it’s a remarkable place before you enter. The exterior is a riot of freestyle details of 1900, the work of architect Walter Thomas for Liverpool brewers Robert Cain & Sons. Stepped gables, finials, turrets, balconies, and a big protruding corner feature all vie for attention – but somehow manage to cohere into a whole. You see the stand-out feature as you go in: a set of Art Nouveau gates in black iron and gleaming gilded copper.

Gates: by Henry Bloomfield Bare; Liver bird, gazelles, women’s heads, and the motto of Cain’s brewery, Pacem amo (I love peace).

Step inside, and you’re in another world. An intricate plaster ceiling, carved mahogany fittings, a mosaic-fronted bar counter and stained glass panels immediately catch the eye. The sheer quality is obvious at once – the crisp lines of those ceiling pendants, the beauty of the woodwork (many of the joiners also worked on the interiors of great ocean liners, swapping between architectural and marine jobs according to the availability of work). 

Mosaic-fronted bar, mahogany fittings, heraldic stained glass, and Jacobean revival ceiling. The interior work was supervised by George Hall Neale and Arthur Stratton of Liverpool’s School of Architecture and Applied Arts.

Repoussé copper panel by Henry Bloomfield Bare, reflecting the pub’s musical links. 

Then as you grasp your pint and settle at one of the tables, you take in a variety of other decorative touches that go in quality and quantity way beyond what anyone has any right to expect in even an elaborate Victorian gin palace. Repoussé copper panels, etched glass, decorative mirror glass, tiles, a vast room (referred to as the Billiards Room, though some say it may have been a restaurant) with a plaster frieze, even the marbles and tiles of the gents toilets* – there seems to be no end to it.

Plaster frieze in the Billiards Room. Major figure work is by the sculptor Charles John Allen (his friend, a Mrs Ryan, modelled for the caryatid figures); other plasterwork was by a talented Irishman, Pat Honan.

This magnificent pub surpassed the expectations I had when I put it on my list. It’s a testimony to the huge prosperity of Liverpool, which was at its height in 1900 when the Philharmonic was built. I noted when I read about the building in Geoff Brandwood’s excellent book Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, that it was listed by English Heritage at Grade II* – an exceptional rating for a pub. However, I noticed on checking the current listing that it’s now actually listed at Grade I, the top listing reserved for the country’s most exceptional buildings. Rightly so. I’d encourage anyone who likes this kind of thing to put it on their personal list, head to Liverpool, stand themselves a pint, and toast Robert Cain & Sons and the team of architects and craft workers who made this place possible.

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* There’s an old post about the lavatories here.

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.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Church side, market side

On the street called North Church Side, hard by Hull’s impressive medieval Minster, is the city’s Edwardian Market Hall. The building houses a market behind the row of ground-floor arches while the upper floor was designed to accommodate a corn exchange and a venue for concerts. In adopting this multi-purpose structure, the building is in the line of countless much older market buildings with an open market below and a meeting room or council chamber above. This Hull example also has a landmark tower – market proprietors and stallholders like towers that guide customers to the goods on offer. This tower, with its open upper section, concave curved cornice, cupola, and tiny lantern, has a baroque feel to it.

However, the main market building leaves the Edwardian baroque behind. Here the architect called on an array of motifs – the large windows with iron balconies, carved panels and cartouches, an area of banded stone and brick, a parapet with a segmental dip in each bay, and above all a doorway with an extraordinarily tall and etiolated keystone (see my photograph below), which, listed like this, suggest a mish-mash but which come together to make a satisfying whole. The person responsible for the design was Joseph Henry HIrst, a prominent local architect who could do grandiose baroque when required (his design for Hull City Hall is an example), but could also produce quaint half-timbered work (as at Carnegie Library, Hull).

The sort of mish-mash he devised for the market is usually referred to as ‘Edwardian Free Style’. It’s not as over the top as full-blown Edwardian baroque can be, not as restrained as the Jacobean revival that’s sometimes used for large buildings of the period. It has an unbuttoned quality that combines with the practical, usable market space to produce a good working building, something a great mercantile city could be and still can be proud of. A century ago, it must have buzzed with business; when we were there it still seemed well used.

Hull, Market Hall, doorway, serene in spite of notices and barriers

Market Harborough, Leicestershire

 

Feel free to admire

Sometimes the purpose of this blog is just to point out things that I like – and I don’t necessarily have much more to say about them than that. This is an example, a former fire station that I passed one morning when walking through the centre of Market Harborough. It was built in 1903 (and then extended, hence the asymmetry of the sign’s position) by Johnson and Coales for Market Harborough District Council and they did a pleasing job on the street frontage. The segmental arches to admit the fire engines have a satisfying curve that’s mirrored in the form of the four upper windows, which must front some beautifully light rooms. The combination of good looks and practicality – the green tiles above a granite base combining toughness with a wipe-down surface, the mix of green and red colouring – is also admirable.

The structure has been converted to a café, and it’s good to see that the building has a useful future now no longer needed by the fire service. And that, from shiny red doors to gleaming green tiles, it’s still looking good after almost 120 years of use. And there’s a bonus across the road: an ambulance station by the same firm of architects with black tiles, white lettering, and a Diocletian window of enormous proportions. The emergency services of early-20th century Market Harborough seems to have been very well provided for.

Euston Road, London

A fire station – with knobs on

I’ve always admired the Fire Station in London’s Euston Road. It’s something to do with the restrained irregularity of it – all those canted bays sticking out at different heights, and the irregular roofline, and the variety of window sizes and shapes, the whole ensemble held together by the unifying and very Londonish palette of red brick and white Portland stone. Two openings below the delightful lettering (classic stuff, down to the substitution of V for U in ‘EVSTON’) originally marked the entrances to a pair of bays where the fire engines were housed. Later the building was given a single-storey extension to the right containing more such garages, and the two visible in the photograph were turned into offices.

There is more of the same winning mix of brick and stone round the corner on the left – it’s an L-shaped building, but I don’t have a photograph that shows this front. That’s because this is not an easy building to photograph. It’s tall, and demands that you stand back a long way to get it all in the frame. It’s also bounded by major roads – there’s nearly always a big red bus going slowly along Euston Road and blocking the view. And if you step back any further, the fire station starts to disappear behind the buildings on either side of Upper Woburn Place to the south (one such late-20th century block is just visible on the right of the frame).

So to take a photograph that does some justice to the architecture one has to step back – but not too far back – and wait for the buses to pass. I also found it helps to ‘lose’ the rest of the traffic in shadows as much as possible, when the red brick glows against a border of blackness. Who was responsible for this bit of architectural wizardry? The fire station was the work of the London Country Council Architects’ Department at the very beginning of the 20th century. Around this time there was a whole sub-department dealing with fire stations, which were being built in many parts of London. The man on this job is said to have been either H. F. T. Cooper or Percy Erskine Nobbs, who the year after this fire station opened moved to Montreal, where he taught in the university and worked on some major Canadian buildings. If Nobbs was involved, this was Canada’s gain and London’s loss.

Victoria Embankment, London

Streaky bacon

Looking at Google Earth on a relative’s mobile the other day and marvelling at how much of London we could see, we chanced upon the Victoria Embankment and I was reminded how, whenever I’m at that end of Westminster Bridge I turn away from the Houses of Parliament (magnificent as they are) and look at these two buildings by the river. They were designed by Norman Shaw as New Scotland Yard – the North Building (right) first, followed by the South. The Metropolitan Police moved into the North Building in 1890, and into the South Building in 1906, after which the two blocks remained the headquarters of the force until 1967. They’re now parliamentary offices.*

When the first building began to go up at the end of the 1880s, this style of architecture was still new. People were rather baffled by it. They’d spent much of the 19th century being told that there was a ‘battle of styles’ between Gothic and Classical. Nobody won the battle, but the Victorians built hundreds of Gothic churches and thousands of Classical secular buildings – plus a few buildings in other recognisable styles of the past, from Romanesque to Renaissance. This office block did not seem to be in a single recognisable style at all. It has Classical details around the windows; the roofs look like something from the French Renaissance; it has polychrome masonry but not of the type used on some Gothic buildings;  the gables have Jacobean decoration; the corner towers – what? – French or Scottish.

Contemporaries were worried by this and anxiously asked Shaw what style he was aiming for. He replied that he was not really interested in style, or in designing facades. What he was interested in was character.† So he produced a hybrid that nowadays is sometimes referred to as ‘free style’. Once people got over the bafflement, this way of building caught on, and there are plenty of well built, handsome, eye-catching buildings, put up in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in this hybrid mode. They often have a mix of brickwork and pale stone, so I think of them as ‘streaky bacon’ buildings. Shaw’s Scotland Yard also has a very solid-looking lower portion in granite, as if the designer wanted to ensure that the whole thing was on the strongest possible footing.

Nowadays we are not so fazed by a 19th-century building in a ‘free’ style. We can look at it and appreciate the artful patterns of the multi-coloured masonry (look at those chimneys), the ornate gables, the variety of window sizes, the relationship between the massive buildings and the corner towers with their delicate ogee cupolas. It’s a design that’s as effective now, after postmodernism and all, as it has ever been.

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* The Metropolitan Police, after various moves, now occupy the 1930s Curtis Green building on the Embankment, just out of my shot to the right. The Curtis Green building is now called New Scotland Yard, while the streaky bacon buildings are known as the Norman Shaw Buildings.

† For more on the buildings, and Shaw’s views on them, see the excellent biography by Andrew Saint, Richard Norman Shaw, Yale UP, 1976.

Oxford

A rich mix

There are perhaps a few people who have been reading this blog for several years, and some of them may remember that I once posted about Frank Cooper’s grocery shop on The High in Oxford, the original home of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. The marmalade, which Cooper made first in the 1870s, became so popular that by the beginning of the 20th century it was necessary to build a dedicated factory to meet the demand.

Cooper’s marmalade factory was built in 1902 to designs by Herbert Quinton. It’s in that late-19th-century hybrid mode which is not too far from Queen Anne and is often referred to by architectural historians as ‘Free Style’. Red brick and Bath stone masonry; big windows, carefully treated; neat details like the little Tuscan columns that divide some of the windows – this is the mix of features that typifies Free Style, and which makes this building catch the eye.


The central carriage entrance is especially ornate. The carved ornament above the entrance, the banded masonry on either side, the whacky bulges above them, not to mention the fancy iron gates all add up to something special. And up at the top of the building, the curvy (echoing the curvy tops of the second-floor windows) is a nice touch too, concealing the roof and, with its ball finials, adding some interest to the skyline.

It’s quite a rich spread of a building, then. But also, one imagines, quite practical – those big windows make for a light and well ventilated interior. Part of it is now used as The Jam Factory, a combined arts centre, restaurant, and bar, and its light, spacious interiors seem well suited to this role too.

Greycoat Place, London

Architectural pyrotechnics

Nowadays, fire stations are often seen as utilitarian buildings and most of us don’t give them a second glance. But in the Edwardian era, when the idea of purpose-built fire stations across the capital was still quite new, they could be built to stand out. A number were built in the early years of the 20th century when the architect to the London Country Council was William Edward Riley, son of a fireworks manufacturer. Riley got the LCC job in 1899 and stayed until his retirement 20 years later. He had a busy time, building slum-clearance housing schemes, continuing a programme of school building, and providing the capital with utility buildings such as fire stations.

The most famous of these is the fine Arts and Crafts inspired one at Euston, but here’s another good one, the Westminster Fire Brigade Station in Greycoat Place. The brickwork of the upper floors with its stripy stone dressings, sash windows, pilasters, and tall chimneys, is typical of the revivalist style called “Queen Anne”, a kind of loose imitation of a way of building popular in around 1700. But Riley placed this above a lower storey of granite, treated with banded rustication and big key stones above the openings. Details like the semicircular window to the side elevation and smaller round window on the front façade add to the interest.

This is a mix of styles and features that, although we could call it “Queen Anne”, defies classification. Architectural historians often resort to the term “Free Style” for this and other Edwardian mélanges. There’s certainly a freedom about the mix of styles and materials, and the various sizes and shapes of windows and doorways, all of which belie the stolidity of the classical granite and the sober but elegant lettering of the fire station’s name. But what we call it hardly matters. It’s a monumental building with some telling touches – a cracking display from the fireworks-maker’s son.

Harley Street, London

London’s Harley Street is well known for its doctors’ houses and consulting rooms, making the district, as it were, the capital’s bedside manor. The street was first built in the second half of the 18th century, but there are also plenty of houses from the Victorian and Edwardian periods that left such a mark on this part of London. Number 37, on its prominent corner site, is one of the most spectacular.

It was designed by the architect Beresford Pite, who threw at it all his skill in composing the facades of a building and marshalling all kinds of architectural bits and pieces to make a coherent whole. The two frontages are full of incident – windows of different sizes and shapes, the ornate corner oriel, the doorway and curved pediment, the skyline with its big dormer windows. And all this fits together wonderfully.

But what really take the breath away are the sculptures that encourage the eye to linger on the facades. One represents poetry, a laurel-crowned figure with a lyre and volumes of Homer and Milton behind him. Another is a reclining figure with a telescope and a star, representing the science of astronomy. At the top is a caryatid holding up the heavy cornice. The whole collection constitute a little-known London treasure, but the artist who created them was not a Londoner. His name was Frederick Schenk.Frederick Schenk was the son of a German lithographer who settled in Edinburgh. As a young man he worked in his father’s lithographic business before training as an artist in Edinburgh and London, and working as a modeller for various potteries in Staffordshire. Although he was successful in the precise and painstaking work of the ceramic modeller, a change in the pottery market led him to find a new direction in his career. He became an architectural sculptor, and specialized in low-relief work, especially on public buildings – town halls and the like – designed by the architect Henry Hare.

There weren’t that many houses grand enough for Schenk’s stone sculptures, especially as by the turn of the century tilework and terracotta were so fashionable. But the architect Beresford Pite, a man who combined skilful handling of shapes and masses with considerable decorative flair, gave him his chance on this corner site. Schenk picked up the scheme and ran with it, and his splendid reliefs of about 1900 still delight the eye.

Former City Electricity Works, Worcester

From majestic cooling towers to backstreet substations, England’s electricity industry has produced many different kinds of buildings, mostly ignored by architectural historians and passers-by, sometimes condemned as eyesores. This one is far from an eyesore. It’s the former City Electricity Works outside Worcester, sitting back from the road southwest of the city across a meadow by the River Teme. Apart from temporary structures, this delightful building, now converted to apartments, was the first hydroelectric station built by the authorities of an English city. Worcester’s city engineer, S. G. Purchas, did the designs, fitting three big turbines across the river. The red and yellow brick, arched windows, and water-meadow setting ensure that this fine building of the 1890s looked good then and now, generating admiration as well as 400 kilowatts.