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.

Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

Memories of empire

It’s a surprise to arrive in Bexhill, prepared to take a look at one of the most famous examples of English modernism, the De La Warr Pavilion, all white walls, glass and steel, and to encounter a group of buildings with a whiff of the Mughal empire about them. Close to the seafront is Marina Court Avenue, a row of dwellings built in the early-1900s. These houses have Moghul-inspired details including windows with horseshoe arches (like those on the bandstand in my previous post), together with a minaret and an array of chimney stacks in the form of miniature onion domes. The nearby Marina Arcade, with its copper-domed entrances, is clearly a development of the same period and style.

The Maharajah of Cooch Behar moved into one of the houses in 1911 to convalesce when he became ill after attending King George V’s coronation. However, the presence of the maharajah does not seem to have inspired the architecture of these houses – they were built several years before he arrived. Back then, however, this style of architecture looked less out of place in this English seaside town, because Bexhill had a major building partly in the Mughal taste: the kursaal.

Kursaal is a term derived from two German words meaning ‘cure’ and ‘room’, and a kursaal was a prominent feature in Central European spa towns, places where you went to be cured of your ills. In fact such buildings were more about entertainment than medicine – they usually had a large hall for concerts and assemblies, together with side rooms for other functions, including at Bexhill separate reading rooms for ladies and gentlemen. More to the architectural point, Bexhill’s kursaal was adorned with large ‘oriental’-looking domes and a minaret. Built in the 1890s, they survived until the building of the De La Warr Pavilion, with its theatre, café, and sitting areas, led to its demolition.

In this context, the smaller buildings ofMarina Court Avenue and Marina Arcade would not have looked out of place, creating a small cluster of onion domes, horseshoe arches, and ornate glazing to give an impression that would have seemed exotic to British visitors. This kind of architectural borrowing of foreign styles is now looked down on as ‘cultural appropriation’, but back in the 1890s and early-1900s, Britain had an empire, having appropriated not just the culture but also the land of numerous foreign powers. Buildings influenced by the architecture of India would have reminded people of British global power. They might also have reminded the people of Bexhill that if Brighton, just along the coast, could have an outstanding ‘oriental’ building in the Royal Pavilion, Bexhill too merited its share of the action.

Dome-like chimney stacks and ‘oriental’ windows, Bexhill

Harrogate, Yorkshire

High up in Harrogate 2

For the second in my trio of Harrogate towers (all of them from the town’s heyday at the end of the 19th century), I’ve chosen the Westminster Shopping Arcade. When this was built in 1898, shopping arcades were enjoying something of a golden age. The Victorians loved arcades, because they gave pedestrians an escape route from the noise, smell, and bustle of the streets. By presenting themselves as elegant or exclusive, arcades shunned the lower classes and did their best to keep out anyone who might be a pickpocket. Middle-class and upper-class shoppers felt safe and able to shop and window-shop in comfort and at ease. 

An arcade was an interesting challenge for an architect. Inside there would be elegant shopfronts (think rich, dark woods, gilded lettering), and a well-lit central walkway (often achieved with an iron and glass roof). But outside? The frontage was often quite small, and the challenge was to make it look at once inviting and upmarket. Norwich’s Royal Arcade (blogged long ago here) is a small masterpiece in this regard, with its curving frontage and colourful tiles. The architect of the Westminster Arcade, perhaps inspired by the name, with its hint of the Houses of Parliament, went for a faux late-medieval look – stone walls, vaguely Gothic (or Tudor Gothic) windows, battlements, protruding corner turrets, and a wooden ‘belfry’ topped with a pointed spire-like roof. Quite a lot of care was given to the details of the belfry. Openings, shafts, crenellations, and the pattern of the roof slates and leadwork are all designed with care, and the whole thing is topped with a wrought-iron crown and finial, a detail seen on several buildings in these parts. No doubt few shoppers even glanced at all this detail once they’d got used to the building. But it turns what could be an anonymous plain frontage into something memorable. It’s an entertaining addition to Harrogate’s varied skyline and well worth an upward glance.

Leeds

Small-scale Leeds (1): Time for shopping

One of the things I’d like to do while travel is restricted is to make some virtual revisits to places I’ve mentioned before on the blog, but which deserve more coverage. A good example is the fascinating city of Leeds – which I covered in September 2019 as ‘Gigantic Leeds’. Maybe it’s time for a short selection of samples of Leeds on a smaller scale.

My first is one of the half-dozen arcades in the city. It’s Thornton’s Arcade, built as part of a development that included some offices and the City Varieties Music Hall, in the Victorian period. Back then, shopping was becoming very much the leisure activity it was in the 20th century, and many cities were building arcades, where people could shop away from the bustle, traffic, noise, and mess of the streets. Such an idea had an obvious appeal to late-Victorian and Edwardian women, who wore long dresses that could get muddied – and worse – on busy and horse-bound city streets, and who liked the idea of a safe, covered environment in which to shop. 

Architect George Smith produced a narrow but comfortable small arcade with an iron and glass roof, which, like that of a railway station, ensured that the interior was flooded with natural light. So shoppers could see where they were going – and what was on display in the shop windows – and security staff could keep a watch for pickpockets, a menace that, years after Oliver Twist, was still very much with us.

The roof is pointed and its is supported by and rests on unusual horseshoe-shaped trusses. These trusses, similar to the one visible in my picture, are painted blue and take the viewer into a different world – the kind of mild orientalism that reminds me that the bazaar in one of James Joyce’s short stories was called ‘Araby’.

At the far end is the piece de resistance: a clock with cast-iron automata. The figures include Richard Coeur de Lion, Robin Hood, Gurth the Swineherd, and Friar Tuck,† and are drawn from the once very familiar Robin Hood stories, in particular as made popular by Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe. Potts and Sons (eminent clockmakers who sold public clocks nationwide but were based in Leeds) manufactured the clock and the figures (almost life-size – not quite so small-scale, then) were done by J. W. Appleyard, a Leeds stone-carver and sculptor. Clocks were invaluable in a period when owning a watch was by no means universal, and the colourful tableau also turned the timepiece into a bit of entertainment – another example of the tendency for shopping to become – as fitting in an arcade next to a music hall – part of the entertainment industry.

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† Friar Tuck has presumably pulled up his habit to give him freedom of movement as he does his share of the heavy work of striking the bells.

Marlborough, Wiltshire

Town texture: columns and tile-hanging

Marlborough is one of the English towns (Blandford Forum and Warwick are others) whose history was changed by a great fire. Marlborough’s major fire occurred in 1653 and there were further fires in the late-17th century. Substantial rebuilding in the late-17th and early-18th centuries has left the centre of the town with its own distinctive appearance – the High Street displays a unified townscape of red tiled roofs, gables facing the street, tile-hung walls, bay windows, and arcaded ground floors.* It’s not all like this – there are also a few white and black-and-white facades – but there’s enough of it to set a dominant and satisfying style.

The most unusual and outstanding aspect of this is the arcading. There are a few English towns that have substantial runs of arcading in main streets, and they vary quite a lot in design. At Totnes, the upper storeys of the buildings overhang the walks beneath, so that the columns are flush with the upper part of the facades. At Tunbridge Wells, the famous ‘Pantiles’ have arcades that protrude forwards from the building line, so that they cover the pavements at ground level and house balconies above. And in the case of Chester’s ‘Rows’, the arcades are upstairs, on the first floor. Marlborough’s arcades break forward slightly from overhanging upper storeys, so that they cover only part of the pavement. They are topped not with balconies, as at Tunbridge Wells, but with narrow pitched roofs. These are covered with tiles that match in colour the clay tiles with which the walls above are hung, giving a pleasantly ruddy colour to the facades. Many, but not all, the tiles have a ‘fish-scale’ pattern, so they also have an attractive texture.

The building in my picture probably dates mainly from the post-fire period of the late-17th to 18th centuries. Its 18th-century bay windows have replacement sashes, but some of these retain 18th-century-style small panes. The wooden columns along the ground floor are original and a local builder’s or carpenter’s version of Doric. A number of buildings like this, plus one or two timber-framed ones like the neighbour to the right, combine to give the street its character,

Very broad, long, and curving slightly, this is one of the country’s notable streets, a wonderful setting for the market, for shopping, or for an evening stroll. It’s not always easy to see it as a whole, because it’s so long, and it’s often full of market stalls or parked cars. An aerial view gives one a clearer idea; a closer view reveals its colourful effect and distinctive texture.

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*Tile-hanging is a speciality in the southeast, in Sussex and Kent especially. But you also find tile-hung walls in other places, such as parts of Buckinghamshire, and in Wiltshire in Marlborough and some of the nearby villages.

Image of whole street, above © Country Life

Royal Opera Arcade, London

Shopping opportunity

The Royal Opera Arcade, tucked away next to what is now Her Majesty’s Theatre, between Pall Mall and Charles II Street in central London, is Britain’s oldest shopping arcade. It was designed in 1815, as a passage roofed with a vault and lit by circular skylights, by John Nash and George Repton. Along one side run 18 shops, each with a neat, projecting quadrant-cornered window – very fashionable in this period. Each shop has a basement and a mezzanine floor inside but these are small shops and the whole development is compact – the walkway is less than 4 metres wide. This was England’s first arcade of this type and the design is influenced more by the Parisian arcades than by English precedents such as the long-vanished ‘Exchanges’ of the 17th century. Although few later architects copied Nash and Repton’s lovely vaults and domes, the overall layout set the style for this kind of exclusive, covered shopping development, and others, such as the famous Burlington Arcade off Piccadilly, soon followed.

Arcades along these lines evolved as developers saw the opportunity to woo shoppers off city streets – which were muddy, noisy, crowded, and often dangerous – into a drier, cleaner, more protected environment. In an arcade, well-to-do Regency and Victorian shoppers did not get their clothes* spattered with mud and stood less chance of losing their money or portable possessions to Oliver Twist and his predecessors. In the little shops in an arcade they could expect to find small, luxury items – jewellery perhaps, exquisite glassware, pens and equipment for the gentleman’s study, upmarket gifts and costly knickknacks. From the 18th century onwards shopping was for the middle and upper classes increasingly a form of recreation, and places like Nash’s Royal Opera Arcade provided a comfortable setting in which this leisure activity could take place. Fifty years on, though, the arcade was less successful, perhaps because shoppers were more attracted to the area around Piccadilly. Henry Mayhew, in his The Shops and Companies of London (1865), described it as “the Arcade of the Melancholy-Mad Bootmakers”. Nowadays it has rediscovered some of its early glamour, and details of the current shops can be found here.

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* For women's fashions in 1821, just a few years after the arcade opened, look here.