Sheffield

The good fight

Although they don’t always make a big thing of it, allusions to military architecture fit rather well with the martial metaphor used by the Salvation Army – ministers and lay leaders given quasi military ‘ranks’, places of worship called citadels, the use of brass bands.* There are quite a few Salvation Army citadels with facades that draw on the vocabulary of fortification: turrets, crenellations, arrow slits. This one in Sheffield, designed by William Gilbee Scott, is a good example. It has been empty for nearly 20 years since the Army left,† but plans are afoot to renovate and repurpose the building with minimal changes to the front, at least.

What we have for now is a fine if dilapidated facade, which is castle-like at the very top, with its trinity of towers, the central one larger and turreted, to resemble a gatehouse. Behind it’s mostly a brick shed, fitted out within with raked seating and a balcony, rather like a theatre. There are big windows, at which point the similarity to a castle fades away, yielding to the necessity for a light interior in which one can read the words in one’s songbook.

The building presents an assertive face to the world then, but this is hardly inappropriate for the Army, who combine their hands-on, hard-working approach to solving social ills with an ethos of vigorous preaching. It’s also right for a big city like Sheffield, which is hardly a place for architectural shrinking violets.§ There are a lot of assertive facades in this city, all yelling for attention. Why should the devil have all the best fronts?

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* And it should be emphasised that it is a metaphor. The Salvation Army fights by getting out there and helping people who need help.

† For a location in Psalter Street: you couldn’t make it up.

§ Although it can sometimes be a place for thriving architectural buddleia, alas. I do hope the botanic invasion of this facade is put right soon. This is the last of Sheffield from me, for a while. On to other matters soon – although I do hope to cover the city’s great neighbour Leeds in the not too distant future. 

Sheffield

Base station

I’ve meant for a while to take a photograph of one of London’s few surviving police boxes – those blue kiosks from which police officers and the public could get in direct contact with a police station – but the other day I saw this rather different one in Sheffield and thought it would make an interesting alternative.

Sheffield’s police began to install boxes like this one by the Town Hall during the 1920s and continued to use them until the 1960s, by which time officers were equipped with personal radios. Each one had a telephone that any member of the police or the public could use to report a crime or other emergency – it was accessible from the outside by opening the small cupboard door beneath the window. In addition officers, as well as calling out from the box, would visit it every hour, when the station telephoned through any important information. Officers out on patrol often used the boxes for meal breaks or even for doing a bit of quick report writing. The Sheffield boxes, which had a generous, squarish plan as opposed to the smaller London boxes, had just about enough space to make this possible.* The box also contained a first aid kit – I wonder if people got to this through another small door located where there is now a silver plaque outlining the history of police boxes.

Anyone familiar with London’s police boxes (and that is a lot of people since the Doctor in the TV series Dr Who uses one¶) will be surprised that this Sheffield example looks very different – green, not blue and with a curved roof rather than the stepped pyramidal roof of the London design. Police boxes in London were blue and boxes in some cities were red, apparently: I suppose any strong colour worked provided that the box was recognisable. One feature that was common to all the boxes was a blue light (long gone from this one) which was controlled from a central point and a could be made to flash to summon an officer.

Before the advent of proper mobile communications, police boxes must have been invaluable to the constabulary. According to one source, they were even used as temporary lockups in some towns – although I doubt that the wooden walls and glass windows of this one would have made it very suitable for this. But as a communications aid, this simple design, smart enough to take its place on a city street, big enough to contain a desk and a stool, and bright enough to be seen, no doubt served the city and its police force well.

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* Edinburgh’s fine blue police boxes, of neo-Classical design with broken pediments, were of a rectangular shape and also roomy.

¶ The Doctor’s time machine and spacecraft, the Tardis, took, and takes, and will take the form of a London police box. Such is the success of the long-running series that many British people are now more likely to think of the Doctor than the police when they see one of these.

† For more on police boxes, see the Old Police Cells Museum, here.

Sheffield

  
White heat

Sheffield, of course, is known above all as a steel town. Even in the commercial city centre, away from the larger forges and factories, we’re often reminded of this. The White Building on Fitzalan Square is an office block of 1908 clad in faience and is one of the many substantial such buildings that reflect the prosperity of this place in the 19th and early-20th centuries – prosperity that was largely down to the steel industry.

The faience cladding was unusual here in 1908 – the dominant hues in this city are red brick, orangey terracotta, and stone. There are more later white buildings (together with the late-20th century’s contributions of concrete in a range of greys) so when this one was erected, it was known as The White Building, as if there was just the one. It certainly stands out, with its flattened arches and unusually shaped pediments above the upper windows, not to mention the surprising, almost rococo swags below the cornice. Gibbs & Flockon,* the architects, did a more than decent job.

But what I most like about it is the way the building acknowledges Sheffield’s industrial activity with a series of ten reliefs of Sheffield trades, by Alfred and William Tory. These are in low relief and beautifully delineate various metalworking jobs, from casting to engraving and planishing. The figures are well modelled, and look as if drawn from life, with both sculptors adept at rendering the surfaces of flesh and garments. If the white surfaces, recalling classical marble, give the reliefs a sense of calm and cool that’s a world away from the heat and noise of a real factory, they still have an authentic feel to them: this looks like real work, combining strength and skill. Above all, the workers, variously employed, are united in their intent concentration on the job in hand.

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* A longstanding Sheffield firm, which changed name as family members and other partners came and went.

Sheffield

Eye-Witness to industry

One of the things that impressed me about Sheffield was that there are still remains of its industrial past right in the centre of the city. Most visitors must be aware of this – a walk down the central Arundel Street reveals a number of former factories; some of them have been beautifully restored; all the buildings are at least in use. My walks around the city took me west of these buildings, until I came to Milton Street and found Eye-Witness Works, which, my Pevsner City Guide to Sheffield tells me, is the only traditional integrated cutlery works still in operation in the city. Except that it isn’t any more: I arrived to find notices on the doors with details of the firm’s new address. Eye-Witness works, meanwhile, bears a ‘for sale’ sign.

What one can see from the street is a long, three-storey brick building that fronts three courtyards. Looking at the brickwork, and the style and position of the windows, it’s clear that the building is actually the result of several different construction phases. The part in the foreground, with the round-topped windows at first-floor level, is from about 1852, the other parts came later, with the long range at the far end added in about 1875, when the older sections were also heightened (see the change in the colour of the brickwork). The early part of the building, at least, is not totally utilitarian – the corner has some stone dressing and there’s a Venetian window above the first cart entrance, to add a visual highlight. Mostly though, this factory is plain and businesslike and must have served its users well for decades.

The lettering however, as can be seen in my lower photograph, is barely hanging on. The paintwork has deteriorated and some of the letters have fallen off, while others are coming to pieces. They look to be wooden letters, and naturally have not proved as durable as the carved stone signs on some of the other former factories in the city. It would be wonderful if the purchasers restored this lettering, so that we are never in any doubt that this was ‘Eye-Witness Works, Cutlery and Plate Manufacturers’, the message as clear as it was at the time the sign was first erected, perhaps in the late-19th century, when it must have been as shiny as Sheffield plate.

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* I have a feeling there may be one or two more Sheffield posts coming up.

Sheffield

Marks of quality

To Sheffield, where I gave a talk and spent a day or so admiring the architecture. Having little time, I restricted myself to the city centre and marvelled at the variety –  of stone and brick, industrial and commercial, old and new, filigree and brutalist. One of the highlights for me were a number of architectural sculptures by the Tory family, who were active in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. First there was Frank Tory, who got his training at Lambeth College of Art before coming to Sheffield to produce carvings for the corn exchange (no longer standing). As well as doing a range of architectural carving he taught at the Sheffield College of Art and among his pupils were his twin sons Alfred Herbert and William Frank.

Here’s a bit of Frank’s work, on Parade Chambers, an 1883 building for Pawson and Brailsford, a company of printers and stationers. The architects, M E Hadfield and Sons, gave his client an impressive Tudor style building in brick with stone dressings, with offices on the upper floors, shops below. It’s a memorable building, with ornate gables, turrets, oriels, and tall chimneys, but what sets it apart for me is the carving on the stonework. The panel in my photograph is in a window above the doorway and features heads of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Caxton within wreaths of leaves.

With this panel Pawson and Brailsford put themselves firmly in the tradition of great English printers – Caxton was thought to have introduced printing to England and his first known book was an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This was not an unusual line for printers to take – I’ve noticed a printer doing a similar thing in Bristol. However, Edward Everard, the Bristolian printer, also linked himself with a great modern master, William Morris, and chose the latest Art Nouveau style for the decoration of his building. This Sheffield firm by contrast emphasised tradition in both architecture and decorative subject matter and their use of first-class architectural sculptors also says something about their commitment to quality.

Photographers’ Gallery, London

The street where you lived

There are still a few weeks for anyone within striking distance of London to see the current exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of the work of British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014). Mayne is remembered particularly for his images of street life – notably of young people – in London in the 1950s and 1960s. He is especially associated with this point in British history, when children still played in city streets, when local communities were tightly knit, and when the first generation to be known as teenagers were making their mark.

His most famous sequences of photographs was taken in West London’s Southam Street, which soon after he made the pictures was flattened to make way for Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. The exhibition shows these images, as well as others taken in Leeds, and a group showing young workers in the Raleigh Cycle factory in Nottingham. Some of the images were used on the covers of Penguin and Pelican books, of which a selection are included too. One can see why Penguin chose Mayne's images: he nails his subjects decisively, time after time.

Roger Mayne, Park Hill Estate, Sheffield 
Photograph © Roger Mayne / Mary Evans Picture Library

Another group, which appeared in the magazine Architectural Design in September 1963, capture Sheffield’s Park Hill estate, which was designed in the early-1960s as a council estate in one huge building, by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, working in Sheffield Corporation’s City Architect’s department under J. L. Womersley. What’s striking about these images is the way they rewrite the rules of architectural photography. Instead of pristine buildings in a setting empty of human life, Mayne’s pictures have people everywhere – chatting on walkways, sauntering on pavements, playing outdoors. They’re refreshing and lively, in a way that so many photographs of new buildings are not.

The final part of the exhibition contains an installation, a whole exhibition in itself, called The British At Leisure. This was made for the Milan Triennale in 1964 and consists of 310 colour photographs projected on to screens, to the accompaniment of a specially written jazz score and the constant clacking and clunking of five Carousel slide projectors. Here are people playing every imaginable sport from cricket to cycling, people relaxing in parks and cafés, at the opera or art gallery, fishing, gardening, motoring, enjoying Christmas and November 5th, sunning themselves on the beach, sailing model boats, riding, showing dogs, and so on and on. It’s a kaleidoscope of British life in the early-1960s, and I was riveted.

This is a terrific exhibition of work by a man who insisted that photography is an art and who proved it in image after image, who portrayed a time in British history like no one else, and whose work endures for its ability, again and again, to capture decisive moments.

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The images are © Roger Mayne / Mary Evans Picture Library
The exhibition ends on 11 June.

Sheffield

Co-op modern

This 1936 design features the Midhill Road branch of the Sheffield and Ecclesall Co-operartive Society. Designed by J W Blackhurst, it is a resplendent combination of plate glass, chromium trim, lettering made up almost entirely of straight lines, and the signature material of 1930s shop fronts, Vitrolite. Vitrolite, a form of coloured glass available in a range of hues including orange, black, pale yellow, and pale green, produced hard shiny wipe-down surfaces that were much admired in the 1930s. The material is not so common today, but a skin of black Vitrolite still covers the Daily Express building in London’s Fleet Street.

Vitrolite and chrome were used with flair in this shop front, now alas demolished. The dark cornice, overhanging canopy, grids of glazing bars and railings, and the lettering, all combine in a glittering, angular whole. It’s flashy, in the way the Art Deco cinemas are flashy, but also hygienic and wholesome, a blending of apparent opposites not unlike the powerful combination of capitalism and mutual ownership on which the co-operative movement itself was built.