Liverpool, St John's Lane

 

Liverpudlian Goth-ish

St John’s Lane in central Liverpool is dominated by St John’s Gardens and one end of St George’s Hall on one side; the other side is made up mostly of recent developments – St John’s Precinct and a large, glass-fronted office building, the Observatory. Standing in splendid Victorian isolation is the former office of the Pearl Assurance Company, which catches the pedestrian’s eye with a very ornate corner entrance. It’s a phantasmagoria of arches, shafts, and Gothic details such as trefoils, stubby pinnacles, carved capitals and openwork parapets in a mixture of grey granite and buff-to-reddish stone. Over the door, a semicircular tympanum bears the name of the company in green and gold mosaic. Look up, and this entrance is crowned by a tower and spire. Beyond, four sets of office windows with gables above lead the eye down St John’s Lane while a slightly shorter facade of three gables stretches along Queen Square.

This building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1896–8. It’s a relic of a time when many large insurance companies had offices in large provincial cities as well as headquarters in London. Waterhouse’s bread and butter was designing such structures for Prudential – most of those are in bright red brick and terracotta and many, like the huge Prudential HQ in London are still there, occupied by other companies. For Pearl, Waterhouse used stone. Struck first by the entrance, I mentally filed the building under ‘Liverpudlian Gothic’, like the office block in my previous post. But a quick look made me realise that it’s more complicated than that. The details on the corner are Gothic, sure enough. But the arches are all semicircular, not pointed as one would expect in a Gothic building. And the side windows and gables seem to speak more of a Jacobean revival style.

View of the building showing the facades on St John’s Lane and Queen Square

By the 1890s, many architects were leaving behind the kind of strict, would-be accurate revivalism adopted by their predecessors earlier in the Victorian period – especially in secular buildings but even in churches too. The more vernacular building of the Arts and Crafts movement had arrived; Art Nouveau was just around the corner; and for designers like Waterhouse, working for clients who wanted buildings that were part landmark (the spire), part status symbol (the decoration), and part economical use of space, an eclectic kind of architecture was a good solution. Although Pearl Assurance has disappeared (after a takeover in the late-1980s), this building carries on, a tribute to an architectural blend of ideas and requirements that led to something practical, but hardly a visual compromise.

Note Thank you to my regular readers for indulging me in my splurge of Liverpool buildings over the last few weeks. I had not visited the city for years and it was even more architecturally rich than I remembered. My next few posts will be from elsewhere, but I plan to do more Liverpudlian posts in the future.

Liverpool, Bixteth Street

Liverpudlian Gothic

There are still a large number of good 19th-century commercial buildings in central Liverpool, and some of them are highly decorative, as if to emphasise the prosperity of the city in this period. Some of these structures are enormous, but even relatively small ones can be visually exciting, and Gothic, a style primarily but by no means exclusively associated with churches, lends itself well to showy facades. Here’s a good example, an office building, dating probably to the 1860s.

This building is called Lombard Chambers, but its architecture is the Victorian version of Venetian Gothic – polychrome masonry (red brick with stone dressings and a grey stone plinth), with lots of pointed arches and a distinctive gable with a row of tiny arches beneath the cornice. The central shafts of the pairs of windows on the second floor are made of iron although they could easily be mistaken for grey stone.* Some of the pale stone is carved with intricate foliage designs and creatures curled around one another (see my photograph below). 

I say it’s probably an 1860s design not only because that’s the verdict of the Pevsner guide to Liverpool,† but also because it was in the 1860s that this kind of highly ornate, rather jazzy, facade became fashionable. Venice, once the base of a maritime trading empire, appealed to businessmen in Britain’s big commercial ports like Liverpool. John Ruskin had compared the empires of Britain and Venice in his monumental book The Stones of Venice in the 1850s, and he loved the Gothic architecture of the city.

Ruskin’s admiration of Gothic architecture, and of Venetian Gothic in particular, was influential, and Venetian Gothic offices and even factories popped up in many English cities. Industrialists generally liked them not for Ruskin’s refined moral and aesthetic reasons, but because you could make a colourful splash with polychrome brickwork, pointed arches, and crisp carving. A building like this could act as a landmark and an advertisement for the owner. I don’t know who built this particular example, but the result still catches the eye and lodges itself in the memory.

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* I count the floors upwards from the lowest visible level thus, in English fashion: basement, ground floor, first floor, second floor, third floor; above the latter a modern attic floor, set back from the front, is just visible.

† Joseph Sharples, Liverpool (Yale University Press, 2004)

Lombard Chambers: carved details

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.

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.

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.

Witney, Oxfordshire

 

Occasional haunts…

…that just keep on giving: there are certain small towns, mostly in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, that I visit quite often, and where I find myself staring at some architectural feature that I’ve not looked at closely before. Here’s an example in Witney: a probably 19th-century shop with a collection of ghost signs that I was aware of, but had not perhaps given the attention they deserved. Above the modern shop front one can see brick walls made up of a pattern of light and dark bricks – red or brown bricks with their long sides (the stretchers) visible and between them pale white or cream bricks laid so that their ends (the headers) can be seen. The resulting effect is pleasingly mottled, making the upper floors more appealing than the unfortunate shop front below. 

But what makes the building stand out for me are the painted signs. They’re faded, and when I first saw the building I noticed only the large letters across the front: GLO’STER HOUSE, the first word a once common contraction of Gloucester, in which the apostrophe, not always included, is just about visible here (clicking on the image should make it larger and clearer). The words on the corner are more informative, however. The fourth word down, just above the lamp, foxed me at first, because I thought it was HOTEL. But what the words on the corner actually say is, I believe: VINER’S FURNISHING STORES NOTED HOUSE FOR Bedsteads, MATTRESSES, BEDDING, TIN TRUNKS, CARPETS. I think there may once have been more – is that an AND below CARPETS? Even without the missing bit, we get a picture of a home furnishing and bedding store.

I’ve not found out much about Viner’s except that a photograph with the ghost sign in place and the business still open can be seen online, with a suggested date of c. 1964. It’s very blurred and looks as if it may have come from an old newspaper. Perhaps Viner’s, then, were in business through the first half of the 20th century and well into the 1960s. That decade marked my first personal knowledge of Witney, when I remember as a boy being driven by my father along the A40 road, which then passed straight through the middle of the town. I vaguely recall being struck by various shop signs, including, on a butcher’s a board painted with the slogan, PLEASED TO MEET YOU – MEAT TO PLEASE YOU. The locally made blankets were also featured on signboards – I expect Viner’s stocked them too. How good to be reminded of such things by the fading ghost sign of Messrs Viner. Though their wares are no longer sold here, the sign is still doing worthwhile evocative work.

Manchester, Portland Street

One for Cottonpolis

Some of Manchester’s commercial buildings are so vast that they defeat the photographic efforts of a mere amateur with an iPhone. You really need skill and a camera with a good wide-angle lens to do justice to the 1850s monster on Portland Street that is now the Britannia Hotel. The whole thing is around 300 ft in length and the seven storeys reach about 100 ft in height. A structure with clearly palatial aspirations, it began life as a warehouse for the textile merchants S & J Watts, Manchester’s biggest wholesale drapers. It was a home trade warehouse, in other words a place where British clothing and haberdashery retailers would come to inspect and order stock for their shops. Inside were grand showrooms, where customers could examine the goods, plus floors for storage and offices for the administrative staff.

Architectural historians such as Clare Hartwell* have detected a similarity in the overall shape of the building to the Fondacho dei Turchi in Venice. That’s true enough, but let no casual user of AI be foxed into thinking that this hulk of a structure is ‘in the Venetian style’.† Apart from anything else, something as weighty as this would surely sink into the lagoon. As for the stylistic treatment, Manchester architects Travis and Mangnall threw the kitchen sink at it. Each floor is treated differently, and there is a mixture of Italian and English Renaissance detail, plus the rather baroque heavily rusticated entrance floor, where the deeply cut masonry and big voussoirs of the arches are combined with more delicate carved detail, some of which is visible if you look closely.¶ At least the detail is all classical, one muses…until one looks up to the skyline, where the four towers have wheel windows that could have come from a Romanesque cathedral.

The differences between the treatment of the floors, together with the fact that there seems to be a lot of variation in ceiling height, give the warehouse a satisfying vertical rhythm, but the overall effect from street level is the simple one of overwhelming size. It’s an enormous lump, for sure, but one that reminds us of the chutzpah of the Manchester cotton traders, of the scale of their activities, and of Manchester’s justified pride in its status as Cottonopolis.

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* Clare Hartwell, Manchester (Pevsner City Guides), 2001

† An AI-generated description saw while looking up various accounts of the warehouse online: caveat googlor.

¶ It’s worth clicking on the images to enlarge them. 

Manchester, Kennedy Street

 

Venice in the North

Drawn along Manchester’s Kennedy Street by the sight of an interesting looking pub, I followed my nose and ended up in front of one of the most surprising bits of 19th-century Venetian Gothic architecture I’d seen in a long while. The least Venetian part of the facade, the stone band about three-quarters of the way up, is the most informative. It bears the words ‘MANCHESTER LAW LIBRARY’, which are emblazoned across the building to tell us the place’s original purpose: it was, in fact, one of the first specialised law libraries outside London when it opened in 1885. It must have been a boon to local solicitors and barristers who needed to look up a bit of obscure law. It continued in its original use until relatively recently.

The architect was Manchester man Thomas Hartas, a young architect for whom this was his first major commission – and, alas, his last since he died in his early thirties, about a year after it was built. The front is virtually completely covered in Gothic tracery – a mixture of tall, cusped windows and roundels expressed as quatrefoils or divided up into a number of flower-like tracery patterns. At the centre is an oriel window, which lights the large first-floor space that made up the library’s reading room. 

The facade is divided vertically into three bays, each made up of trios of windows. These bays are separated by stone uprights that project towards the street, making them more substantial, as they must need to be to support this lace-like frontage and the floors behind. Within, there are no doubt various columns and load-bearing walls that hold the structure together, as well as helping to bear what would have been a considerable weight of shelved books.

As the light began to fail on the winter afternoon when I took my photograph, the interior lights shone out, revealing ceilings and supporting arches within. Back in the 1880s, the effect of the whole building lit up at night must have been striking: a beacon of law and of Venetian architecture, although no canal laps in front or behind and this mock-Venetian palace is book-ended by more conventional Victorian office buildings. A welcome sight, now and then.

Manchester, Cross Street

Steaks and ale

How good to find, in central Manchester’s Cross Street, a building that looks small but punches above its weight. It’s Mr Thomas’s Chop House, and Geoff Brandwood, in the excellent handbook Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, describes it as ‘an exuberant example of fin de siècle architecture in an ornate Jacobean style’. The walls are a mix of buff terracotta and dark red brick, and the curving bow, the mullioned windows and the elaborate gable all speak of the Jacobean revival. The front of the structure was originally a shop and offices, with the chop house behind, but now the whole of the ground floor is made over to eating and drinking – and indeed must have been so for much of the building’s history, as the interior looks unified in its decoration, down to early features such as tiles.

Looking at the details more closely, a beguiling combination of Jacobean and Art Nouveau becomes apparent. The decoration above the corner entrance, for example, combines a coat of arms topped with a helmet as crest, with a lot of curlicues: so far, so traditional. The mythical birds on either side of the coat of arms could be heraldic but also fit nicely with the Art Nouveau style. So, above all, do the heart-shaped motifs higher up, with the curvaceous bands that enclose them, which curl this way and that in a style that was highly fashionable when this building was designed in 1901.

What a delicious entrance to a chop house. But what, exactly, was a chop house? The usually definition is a pub or restaurant where the main item on the menu was meat in the form of steaks or chops. Originally, there seems to have been a sense of something downmarket about such establishments. In his great 18th-century dictionary, Dr Johnson defined a chop house as ‘a mean house of entertainment, where provision ready dressed is sold’. But by the time Thomas Studd set up in business in the 1860s, things were different. Chop houses were where Manchester’s merchants and factory owners came to meet and discuss business over a nourishing meal. As a form of pub, they were very much male-only premises in the Victorian period.

By the time the current building was put up, Thomas had died but his wife Sarah carried on the business with great success. She also transformed it by admitting women – a revolutionary move which must have caused much discussion. Many women were no doubt grateful, and this has a special resonance in Manchester, home of the Pankhursts. I have read that on International Women’s Day in 2019, the building was renamed Sarah’s Chop House in honour of Sarah Studd, but when I visited last month, the original name had been reinstated. Steaks and ale, I’m pleased to say, are still on the menu.

Wilmcote, Warwickshire

 

Beauty of holiness

My interest provoked by hints in Pevsner that the church at Wilmcote might be eccentric or beautiful or possibly both, I crossed the road opposite Mary Arden’s Farm, walked back to the main street, and walked along the usefully named Church Road. There I found a small Gothic Revival church of c. 1840 designed by Harvey Eginton. The kind of Gothic chosen by the architect is Early English, the first phase of Gothic on these islands, sometimes chosen by early Victorians as representing the ‘purest’ form of the style with its simple lancet windows and plain but elegant deeply moulded arches.

On entering, though, it was clear that something unusual was up. This church is very highly decorated inside with wall paintings, lavishly supplied with statues of saints and of the Crucifixion, and altogether rather ornate – far from plain and simple, in fact. This was indeed one of the first churches to be built and decorated under the influence of the Tractarians, that group of clergymen and scholars (many originally based in Oxford and Cambridge), who believed that a church should be highly embellished, that the clergy should wear colourful robes, and that such ritual accompaniments as incense should be used. Worship in ‘the beauty of holiness’* was the aim, in sharp contrast to the plain style of the previous few generations. The person behind this aspect of St Andrew’s, Wilmcote was the Rev. Edward Bowes Knottesford Fortescue, a keen Tractarian who knew many of the movement’s leaders. However, it’s said that a later clergyman, the Rev. F W Doxat, may have been responsible for some parts of the decorative scheme.

The chancel glows in green and gold, its walls painted with stylised flowers and leaves. The decoration, if overwhelming, also does an excellent job of defining the chancel as the most sacred space. The nave is much darker, but when one’s eye adjusts, its possible to make out very different wall decoration: a series of paintings, mainly monochrome compositions showing saints, scenes from the life of Christ, and religious texts. Close examination reveals that these are actually done on panels that have been attached to the walls – in fact, they are on sheets of zinc, a material I don’t recall seeing used for church murals before. I’d been led to this church by the description in Pevsner’s Warwickshire volume in the Buildings of England series, and I’m indebted to the book for the information it contains. But it did not prepare me for the amazement I experienced inside. Such surprises are what keep me looking – and recording here what I find.

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* This phrase is a rewording of the verse in Acts 2:4, describing the scene at Pentecost. The King James Bible gives, ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost…’. For an excellent account of this change in Victorian worship and architecture, see William Whyte, Unlocking the Church, which I reviewed here.

Needham Market, Suffolk

 

Embarrassment of riches?

This is the magnificent railway station building at Needham Market, an impressive Jacobean revival design by Frederick Barnes, who designed numerous stations on the Ipswich and Bury Railway. It’s one of the most outstanding stations on the line, a visual feast of towers, gables and mullioned windows – I think only Bury St Edmunds competes with it in this neck of the woods. The impressive, partly diapered brickwork is enhanced by dressings in Caen stone, a material sometimes found in medieval English cathedrals. Needham Market station closed in the great station cull of the 1960s, but by 1971 it had opened again, although this building had been let to tenants. It is, after all, on the large side for a small town.*

When the station was built – during the railway boom, in 1846–7 – it was still more magnificent than it is today. The square end towers had curvaceous ogee roofs and the three gables were in the Dutch style, also with multiple curves. At some point in the station’s history, these features were modified, giving the end towers crenellated parapets and the gables straight sloping edges. It’s not clear exactly when these alterations were made. Gordon Biddle, in his book Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings, cites a photograph of 1912, which shows the station in its original form. An Aerofilms image of 1928 shows it the way it looks today, so the changes were made long before the station’s short-lived closure.

Whatever the reason the building was altered, it’s still worth noticing. It speaks of a time when a station was not something that was thought best to hide away behind other buildings. Frederick Barnes and the Ipswich and Bury Railway did Needham Market proud.

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* The most recent census put the population at around 5,000.

Framlingham, Suffolk

 

First post

I’d been to Framlingham before, but was not switched on enough to look properly at the post boxes. What a sadly missed opportunity! 

Now, I know that for many people even a slight preoccupation with post boxes is thought to be the preserve of the anorak.* And yet I’d argue (hoping not to get too dull about it) that these small items of street furniture both look good in our towns and villages and provide some insight into social history.

So, in Framlingham the other week, I paused to appreciate one of two such boxes in a very rare early design – octagonal boxes with vertical slits, probably dating to about 1856. This is really early in the history of the post box. When the standard penny post for letters was introduced in 1840, there were no post boxes at all. To post a letter you had to take it to a ‘Receiving Office’ or wait for a man ringing a bell to walk down your street and give your letter to him.

In 1852, the first free-standing post boxes were installed on Jersey; these proved successful and the following year the first of (eventually) thousands of boxes began to be seen on streets on the British mainland. They were all made of cast iron and took a column-like form,† with a vertical slit for the letters. There was no standard design,¶ but this example in Framlingham is one of the earliest still in use. It exhibits many of the features common to later boxes – the initials or cipher of the monarch, a display panel for collection times, a locking door, and so on. It was made by Andrew Handyside, ironfounder of Derby, and probably dates to 1856 or 1857 – Handyside began to produce boxes with horizonal slits in 1857. Horizontal letter slots became the norm, and by 1866 the first national standard box was introduced.

If all this is much too like anorak-speak for you, you’ve probably stopped reading by now. But if you’re still with me you’ll appreciate that such rare early boxes illuminate a bit of postal history and enhance the handful of streets and lanes where they still exist.

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* Informal British English. Anorak: person who has an obsessive interest in something generally thought to be ‘dull and unsociable’ (thanks to Chambers Dictionary for the last phrase).

† Some resembled columns very closely, like the fluted one in Malvern, subject of an earlier post.

¶ To begin with, there was no uniform colour either. Red became the standard hue in 1884.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Light industry

By the River Deben and at the foot of Wickham Market’s High Street lies this cluster of buildings: ‘An attractive group,’ says Pevsner, laconically. Indeed it is, a throw-back to a time when industrial buildings could look both purposeful and pretty. The river, the ducks, and bright light under stormy clouds help the picture too.

What we’re looking at takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The central building is an 18th-century corn mill, weatherboarded in the typical style of this part of East Anglia. The mill leet passes under the twin-arched brick-faced bridge (itself thought to be 19th-century) to the mill to provide its power. A lot of the original machinery remains inside. The mill’s lucam (the projecting structure that contained a hoist) still survives high on the right-hand end.

To the left of the central mill and adjoining it is a white-brick house, still with its windows with the small panes they would have had when the house was first built in the early-19th century. It would have been the miller’s house and the large central window with its semi-circular top suggests that behind is the main staircase, which must be well lit and probably spacious. One gets an impression of understated prosperity.

The brick-built structure on the right-hand side of the picture is another mill. This is again 19th-century and was purpose-built as a steam-powered mill with solid walls able to withstand the vibrations that a steam engine and its connected machinery would produce. The windows have cast-iron lintels now painted white and the lucam is still there, pointing towards the equivalent structure on the older mill. The small structure on the right with the round-headed window is said to be the original engine house – the chimney stack was taken down at some stage. The engine that ran there was made by local firm Whitmore and Binyon, the subject of my previous post, and is now at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life).

So milling no longer takes place here, but the buildings usefully survive – the mill parts house variously storage and a shop selling such things as logs for wood-burning stoves. While the buildings are in use, they are likely to be looked after, preserved, and shown off to their best by the light of the sun.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Cast-iron evidence

The Resident Wise Woman reported that she’d noticed an intriguing pair of iron gateposts a few hundred yards away from where we were staying in the Suffolk town of Wickham Market. Before long I was out on their trail and quickly found the posts, with their fluted uprights and extraordinary spiky finials, which resemble some sort of close-combat weapon, such as a medieval mace. The posts are between some white brick buildings on the town’s main street. A little research revealed their story.*

The gateposts flank the former entrance to the works of Whitmore and Binyon, which in the 19th century was a major employer in the town. Nathaniel Whitmore was a millwright at the end of the 18th century; subsequent generations grew the business, producing not only equipment for milling, but also several kinds of metal goods, from bedsteads to steam engines. From their beginnings as a small local concern, the firm grew top employ some 200 people and by 1868, the Whitmores were joined by George Binyon, a successful engineer and entrepreneur, who brought expertise in agricultural engineering.

The white brick buildings on either side of the gate, which I’d taken to be houses and a shop, were in fact offices of Whitmore and Binyon, together with a shop where customers could call to discuss an order for a steam engine or a pair of gatepoists. From these premises and the factory at the rear, steam engines for mills were dispatched across Suffolk and beyond and diamond-washing equipment was made for the three main diamond mines in South Africa. The company exhibited at major milling exhibitions and had an office in Mark Street, in the City of London. The company seems to have done very well – but for a relatively short time. By 1902 it was in trouble and the works and contents were sold off. From the street, this striking pair of gateposts and modest range of buildings is a quiet testimony to what was once here. Surviving steam engines, including one in the Museum of East Anglian Life that once powered a mill down the road, provide further reminders of a once successful firm.†

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* See for example Wickham Market Movers and Shapers, here.

† I plan to do a further post about the mill for which this engine was built.

Minions, Cornwall

Lost industry

In eastern Cornwall the other week, and driving towards the Devon border and the house of friends we were to visit, it occurred to us that we’d not actually stopped to have a look at one of the many old engine houses that are scattered across the landscape. We’d previously passed through the village of Minions and knew there was one thereabouts, so made a short diversion…as the mist descended and the wind got up. So we looked as closely as we could, and my photographs of what was once the Houseman’s Shaft engine house at the South Phoenix mine show it as a grey eminence seen through an atmosphere as much water vapour as the air we breathe.

Buildings like this housed steam engines that were used to pump water out mines and to haul the excavated material to the surface. Cornish engine houses are generally built out of local stone – usually granite, which is as hard as nails. Thick walls of granite, with corners made extra strong by being built with carefully cut stone quoins, can give a lot of support to the heavy and constantly moving mechanism of a large steam engine – some people see the building as the steam engine’s exoskeleton. Most engine houses have one wall that’s stronger and thicker than the others. This, known in Cornwall as the bob wall, supports the iron beam of the engine, which projects out of the engine house and connects with the mine shaft below ground.

Further information would no doubt have been available in the adjacent building if it had been open, but one can’t expect such facilities so be open all the time, let alone on a wet Sunday morning in October. So we looked, admired the chunky masonry and the tall chimney, and reflected that such engine houses are reminders of an enormous mining industry, extracting copper, tin, arsenic, and other materials. There were once between 2,000 and 3,000 engine houses in Cornwall and western Devon; now some 300 are left in varying degrees of ruination. The workings below the ground near Minions opened in the 1830s (Wheal Prosper was the mine’s original name) before a series of amalgamations and changes of ownership. It was originally a copper mine, and when the copper began to run out, tin was also extracted. The mine closed for good in 1911.

So this engine house saw only a short period of activity in the long history of Cornish metal mining, which began in prehistoric times, had heydays under the Romans, in the Middle Ages, and in the 16th century, before reaching its most productive era in the 19th century. Competition from overseas led to the decline of the industry in the 20th century.* Since the engines have gone, many visitors are unaware of how extensive the industry once was, and how much of a blow to Cornwall’s prosperity its decline represented – just as much of a blow, in its way, as the later closure of coal mines was to communities from Yorkshire to South Wales. Tourism helps, but it’s a seasonal business. Few visitors want to visit and admire Cornwall’s striking beauty and rich history in a rainy October. I’m glad, though, we made that choice on this occasion. Granite in the rain has its beauty, and still carries its powerful message of a great industry long gone.

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* Other mining industries, the extraction of kaolin, for example, and the quarrying of roadstone and slate, do continue in the area.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Names and textures, 1

One of the first things I noticed on arriving in Hull back in July is that the city has some attractive old street name signs. I quickly learned that it also has an extraordinary variety of styles of these signs, probably representing every period from the 19th century to the current decade. This is hardly surprising. For one thing, Hull sustained severe damage from bombing during World War II. For another, it has been a dynamic, developing place, responding to highs and lows, for much of its history. Here’s one example of an early sign in a street I walked along very soon after I arrived.

What a characterful sign this is, and how well it complements the texture of the brick wall to which it’s attached. Its shape, a long rectangle (naturally), cut off at the corners by concave curves, is one that was popular in the 19th and early-20th centuries in many British towns. I’ve noticed signs of a similar shape in places such Louth in Lincolnshire. But signs like the one in Louth are heavy objects, made of thick cast iron, which project visibly from the wall surface and are attached to it by screws that pass through the sign into the brickwork. This one in Hull, by contrast, is much flatter and is fixed in place by screws and washers set around the edge of the sign.

What really caught my eye, though, was the lettering, Most of the letters are of a standard form used by the Victorians on signs, capital letters that have serifs* with a slight curve where they join the main strokes of the letter. The letters also display a notable contrast between the widths of the strokes – thick verticals and thin horizontals. This style gives the letter-designer or sign-writer a particular challenge when it comes to the most curvaceous letters, especially ’S’. In this sign both examples of the letter ’S’ have small serifs that rest slightly above the base line while the lower part of the curve sits a fraction below, giving the letter a slightly free-floating look that I find charming.† The whole sign, I think, looks good on a background of brickwork and sash windows, providing a small asset that’s worth more than a passing glance.

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* A little lettering terminology. Serif: the tiny strokes at the ends of the main strokes of letters. Base line: the imaginary line on which the bottom of each letter sits.

† It’s traditional in sign-writing it was and is normal to place the bottom of a curvy letter such as S or O very slightly below the base line; if it sits on the base line itself, it looks in practice as if it’s floating a little too high. The details of the sign will be clearer if you click on the image to enlarge it. 

Hull, East Yorkshire

Suit you, 2

In the centre of Hull, strolling around on my visit back in the summer, I found Hepworth’s Arcade, a small shopping development of 1894–5. It’s modest, but well detailed, from the glass roof in the form of a barrel vault supported on openwork iron arches (one such arch is visible in my photograph), through the decorated frieze and fluted pilasters of the upper floor, to the small shop fronts at ground level. The name of the arcade is displayed inside as well as out, to remind us that the development was built for Joseph Hepworth, the tailor from Leeds who pioneered the business of supplying reasonably priced made-to-measure suits using a national network of shops.

This is not a grand interior like the magnificent one in Hepworth’s home city designed by the theatre architect Frank Matcham, but local firm Gelder and Kitchen did a good job that has stood the test of time. The development was no doubt a business venture for Hepworth, but he would also have liked the idea that his name would be remembered for more than his large chain of clothes stores. Perhaps this was shrewd, since in the 1980s the Hepworth business metamorphosed into the chain now called Next, while the arcade still bears the Hepworth name.

There is still a men’s clothes shop in the arcade too. It’s called Beasley’s and it has a separate hat shop opposite its main premises. A hat shop: these are rare beasts nowadays. I celebrated its presence by buying myself a straw hat to replace one I’ve had for about 40 years. On my way out into the street I noticed a bit of Hepworth memorabilia: the large and colourful sign advertising their company. I don’t know the age of the sign but its range of traditional letterforms, its lavish scrolls, and the pointing hand (neatly jacketed and shirted of course), suggest some time fairly on in the history of the arcade. It’ll suit me.

Fretherne, Gloucestershire

A class act

Visiting Arlingham the other say (see my recent post here) reminded me of an occasion maybe eight or ten years ago when the Resident Wise Woman, our son and I celebrated my birthday with an excellent lunch at The Old Passage, an outstanding fish restaurant (it closed after covid, alas!) by the River Severn not far from the village. On the way home we stopped at the church of St Mary, Fretherne, which was on our route. My memory of the visit comes back to me through a haze of good food and wine, but we were all mightily impressed by this glorious building, packed with stunning craftsmanship – stone sculpture, woodcarving, painting, tiling, metalwork. To me, there’s something hard and cold about many Victorian churches – the architecture may be very correct Gothic, but the result lacks the irregularities, winning oddities and rough surfaces that make many older churches so delightful. Now and again, however, I find a church that turns these ideas inside out. Such a building is St Mary’s, Fretherne.

From the outside it’s dominated by a wonderful crocketed spire, upward-pointing pinnacles, and steeply pitched roofs. The two-tone stonework is a mixture of toffee-coloured Stinchcombe sandstone and Bath stone dressings, the latter lending itself well to window tracery, carved detail, crockets and other ornaments. Most of these details are exuberant imitations of the architecture of the 14th-century as reimagined by the local architect Francis Niblett in 1846–47. Niblett is not well known outside Gloucestershire. He was the younger son of the owner of Haresfield Court, a few miles to the east of Fretherne, and did quite a lot of church and other work in the county. Fretherne, where he had a sympathetic patron in the upper-class clergyman the Rev. Sir William Lionel Darell, is his masterpiece. Niblett was a dedicated follower of the work of A. W. N. Pugin, who advocated ornate 14th-century Gothic as the style in which to embody ‘the beauty of holiness’. These were also the ideas that the influential clergy of Oxford and Cambridge were behind: out with Classicism (the style of paganism) and in with Gothic (the style of catholic Christianity*); out with the old spartan preaching churches of the 18th century, in with beautiful buildings that were fit for the sacraments and could move you to prayer.

Inside St Mary’s there is beauty everywhere you look. The intricately carved pulpit and font cover; the painted organ case and pipes; corbels and brackets carved with foliage or with angels playing musical instruments; colourful Minton floor tiles; a reredos dripping with miniature arches and shafts and framing a pyrographic picture of the Supper at Emmaus done by a local clergyman; a painstakingly painted and stencilled roof; elaborate hinged metal grilles that allow doors to be left open for ventilation; innumerable details meaning that there’s always something to see that you’ve missed before. This is a very special building.

For all this high-Victorian glory, the place certainly does not feel stuffy. The parish has embraced the eco-church movement. There is community planting in the churchyard – cherry tomatoes were on offer when I was there and parts of God’s acre are kept wild. And amongst the wildness the crocketed lines of Niblett’s beautiful spire rise above the yew trees, thrown into relief by the sunshine and leading the eye upwards to the clouds and the patches of deep blue in the summer sky.

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*By ‘catholic’, the Anglican campaigners of the 1830s onwards meant true to the doctrines of the ancient, undivided Christian church. They believed the Church of England to be a truly ‘catholic’ church.

Angel mural, Fretherne church, Gloucestershire

Hexham, Northumberland

 

Grapes and glazing

I read online that in Britain the rate of pub closures continues to be high: on average one pub is closing every day. Apart from the loss of places to eat and drink and the disapearance of jobs, this also has an impact on architectural heritage. The more important or spectacular pub buildings are protected by listing, but there are many that, while not significant enough for listing still retain interesting or pleasing features that can disappear with a change of use. So when old pub fittings or decorations survive, I’m usually pleased, and sometimes my pleasure finds expression on this blog.

In Hexham, my eye was caught by some good embossed glass in the windows of the Grapes. Sure enough, the decoration features among other things…grapes. It also bears an unusual wording, ‘Family Department’, which may be clearer if you click on the picture to enlarge it. I’d not seen this wording on a pub before. I wonder if any of my readers know of pubs that describe their separate bars or rooms as departments? I’d be interested to hear from them via the comments page if so.

I assume that these glass windows date to the late-Victorian period. They’d be ruinously expensive to install today, especially the curved glass pieces – there are actually two of these, one on either side of the door. Their imagery (mythical beasts, vases containing plants, scrolls and the eponymous grapes) were produced by a skilled craft worker. In his excellent book Victorian Pubs,* Mark Girouard quotes a remark from an 1898 textbook of glass decoration that shows how common this kind of work once was: ‘there is scarcely a warehouse, a bank, a shipping office, or public building throughout our great towns in which embossed or ornamental glass in some shape or another is not used.’

So much of this has vanished over the years; much of what remains is in pubs. There were at least two different ways of producing these designs on glass. Both involved masking part of the design and applying acids to the unmasked portion. In some more elaborate designs, additional techniques such as brilliant cutting the glass, or applying gilding or coloured paints, were also used, but these were expensive techniques and many pubs, like the Grapes in Hexham, made do with the basic embossed decoration. The result, while calling attention to the pub and also restricting the view in from outside, can be elegant, engaging, and well worth preserving. It says ‘pub’ almost as clearly as a swinging hanging sign.†

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* Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (Yale University Press, 1984)

† If you’re interested in another example of this kind of glass, see my post of some ten years ago on the Albert pub in Victoria, London.

Saltaire, West Yorkshire

Well schooled

The industrialist Titus Salt planned his workers’ village with public buildings that were both visually impressive and well designed for their intended purpose. If they proved less than adequate, Salt and his descendants tried to put things right, something that’s exemplified by one of the most impressive of all the village’s structures, the school on Victoria Road, built in 1869. From the outside, the architecture is palatial – there’s a statement being made here about the importance of eduction. Inside, the classrooms were well appointed and there was space for 750 pupils, with the older girls and boys taught separately in rooms on either side of the building and ‘mixed infants’ in a room in the middle, in accordance with the ideas of the time.

The Italianate architecture is kitted out with a full complement of columned loggias, round-headed windows, overhanging eaves, and an imposing bell turret (with a rather small but no doubt effective school bell). What’s more, this structure is richly carved. The central section displays Salt’s coat of arms within a roundel surrounded by laurel leaves and scrolls; to left and right of these elements are relief carvings of woolly creatures. These are alpacas, a reminder that Salt was one of the first in Britain to work with alpaca wool, creating alpaca cloth that became much sought-after. The use of this wool was the key to Salt’s success. No wonder he wanted to celebrate the Peruvian creatures, but in doing so he was providing an instant lesson for the school’s pupils – that’s where the wool comes from, that’s what gives your father employment, that’s why you live here. The bell turret is also richly carved – a boy, a girl, and a globe can be made out beneath its roof.

This imposing building with its lovely carvings was soon outgrown by Saltaire’s burgeoning population. The Salt family lobbied for a new school, and by 1878 a new one had been built, not as magnificent architecturally, but big enough to cope with the demand. The original school remains in use and is now part of Shipley College.

Saltaire school, detail of bell turret and pediment