Liverpool, Lime Street

Second among equals

The Vines* is in many ways similar to Liverpool’s magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms – it was built for the same brewery, Robert Cain & Sons, and designed by the same architect, local man Walter Thomas. It has a similarly dazzling exterior, although the Vines is baroque, rather than the Philharmonic’s freestyle. The corner site is a gift to a pub architect, and Thomas responded with an eye-catching round tower featuring a dome that seems to grow organically from the masonry below; both tower and dome are festooned with curvaceous frames around windows and pediment-like features that proclaim the design’s baroque heritage. The gables are fancy too, with more curves and finials – it’s a shame that neighbouring buildings mean that it’s hard to see much of this skyline against a background of sky.

Fireplace with beaten metalwork surround and panel depicting Viking ships.

Inside, the pub is very much a sibling of the Philharmonic, with much carved mahogany, polished metalwork, and a mix of stained and etched glass. Some of the metalwork is outstanding – the relief featuring Viking ships above the fireplace in my photograph is a good example.

Privacy screen with oval of stained glass. An original bell push is visible on the wall beyond. 

One feature of the layout is a number of wooden privacy screens with Art Nouveau stained glass panels and lamps mounted on metal uprights set into wooden columns. There are also telling memories of a kind of table service not seen in pubs much now (if at all): small bell pushes that enabled customers to call for service without getting up and going to the bar.

Copper-clad bar front, carved mahogany column and elaborate plaster ceiling

Dating from 1907, this pub is a few years later than the Philharmonic, but they clearly have much in common. One difference is the style of plasterwork in the ceilings. While the Philharmonic recalls the Jacobean era (early-17th century), that at the Vines looks to be inspired by designs from later in the same century. It’s no less impressive, and worth a stop to anyone seeking visual or alcoholic refreshment.†

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* The name comes from one Albert Vines, who ran an earlier pub on this site.

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.

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.

Birmingham

Turning a corner, 2

Few buildings turn a corner with such grandeur as this one in Birmingham’s Constitution Hill. It dates from the 1890s and was designed architects William Doubleday* and James R. Shaw for H. B. Sale, a firm of die-sinkers. The plan was to have offices and shops on the ground floor with each upper floor taken up by one large workshop, plus an office in the corner tower. Five floors were planned, but the fifth was not added until the mid-20th century, hence the difference in style.

The exterior is built of red brick with a rich array of terracotta dressings – foliage, flowers, and medieval-style heads all feature and the top of the building as originally constructed was given some distinction with the row of small curved gables still present in front of the 20th-century top storey. The stylistic label given by English Heritage’s short ‘Informed Conservation’ book about the district is Spanish Romanesque-style. The stand-out feature is the tower, which is still a landmark on the junction of Constitution Hill and Hampton Street. Each storey of the tower has a different kind of opening, from the first floor† upwards: trefoil, slightly wasp-waisted arches; flat-topped openings; windows topped with ogees; semicircular openings; and quatrefoils in the tiny gables around the dome. The tower also displays the owner’s name,¶ standing proud from the band of foliate decoration – a popular late-19th century effect that I always admire. Finally, the ogee dome at the top, with its fish-scale surface, provides a pleasing climax, although it’s slightly hidden by the gables and finials that surround it. What a glorious building. I hope its owners are soon able to remove the plants that are taking root towards the top of the tower, so that it can continue to provide the area with a landmark and an admirable collection of exuberant architectural decoration.

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* William Doubleday was based in Wolverhampton when this building was designed; he later moved to Birmingham.

† American second floor.

¶ You can enlarge the picture by clicking on it, which might make this a little easier to see.

Somers Town, London

 

Thereby hang tales...

Here, as hinted in the previous post, are a few examples of the decorative Doulton panels from the blocks of flats in the Sidney Street estate in Somers Town, north of St Pancras. The ceramic panels, made in about 1937 by the artist Gilbert Bayes, seem to depict scenes from fairy tales. There's a very obvious Little Mermaid rescuing her prince (above), a young woman with swans (is it The Swan Princess, or some other tale featuring swans?) and another young woman, this time with an elaborate headdress, about to kiss a young man, this time with pigs on either side (The Princess and the Swineherd, presumably). The stylised medieval dress, flat colours, and faces in profile give quite a 1930s feel to the panels, and the decorations are in keeping with the spacious courtyard and careful architectural details, all of which help to raise these blocks above the norm for social housing. It feels right, somehow, that these buildings should have decoration that's diverting and engaging and that adds a splash of colour to an area that would have been grey, sooty, and smoky in the 1930s when the flats were built.

The Swan Princess

The Princess and the Swineherd

Fin de Siècle round-up

I have produced another in my series of round-up pages, telling briefly the story of architecture at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth, illustrated with links to posts on this blog. This round-up of architecture in England between 1880 and 1918 covers the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and the collection of revivalist styles fashionable in this period, including 'Queen Anne'. It also draws together a number of posts on the architectural decoration of the era, covering buildings from shops to pubs, offices to public libraries. To read this overview of late-Victorian and Edwardian building, or just to catch up on some past posts, you can access this page from the PAGES menu in the right-hand column, or from here.

Blandford Forum, Dorset

Have you got the scrolls?

Pevsner’s Dorset volume says that the old Greyhound Inn, in the centre of Blandford Forum, takes façade decoration to ‘Bavarian extremes’. Although there’s a hint of Saxon (or even Lutheran) hauteur about that comment, he doesn’t mean that the gloriously named John and William Bastard, architect-builders of Blandford who reconstructed the town after the fire of 1731, had been at the beer when they conceived this building, but that the decoration is less restrained than the norm in this town and more like the ornate baroque pastel and white facades of Central Europe.

English Georgian architecture can come over as rather plain, getting its effect not from decorative curlicues but from order, proportion, and restrained classicism. We think of Georgian building in terms of simple brick walls and rows of sash windows, relieved by the occasional pilaster, stretch of rustication, or fancy fanlight, and given form, in the best examples, by craftsmanship of the highest quality – meticulous brickwork, fine carpentry, and so on.

The facade of the Greyhound seems indeed to come from a different world. The decoration around the triangular pediment is from the top drawer, an encrustation of classical details. The Corinthian capitals below it, too, are exceptionally ornate and full of delicate fronds and curves. And then there’s that central window: the big plain keystone at the top and the protruding ‘ears’ at the upper corners are the kind of things seen on many a Georgian window. But the generous scrolls up the sides, the lavish moulding around the sides and top, and the fancy-shaped apron below the sill set this window apart. Even better is the small face in the middle of the apron. Is it a drunken satyr, bearing grapes and welcoming us to the inn? That’s the answer, then: it was wine that the builders were drinking that day.