89 Roe St – tucked into the side of the sprawling St John’s Centre car park and a cosily withdrawn corner of the Royal Court Theatre.
The New Penny Farthing.
A name which instantly evokes arcane loose change and strange bicycles.
Each time as I pass I’m drawn in, yet never enter.
Amazed by the array of ever changing signage, happy hours abound.
It’s a happy house, we’re happy here.
A dark drinking den awaits within, the daytime drinker abides, imbibing.
Stay new.
The cathedral’s architect, Frederick Gibberd, was the winner of a worldwide design competition.
Construction began in 1962 and was completed in 1967.
William Mitchell designed the concrete relief below the bell, two front and two side doors.
Possibly, probably and inevitably the finest Modernist building in Britain.
It continues to surprise the surprised visitor on each successive visit.
A compelling structure which articulates the ever changing marine light, both inside and out – physically and spiritually.
Dizzy detail waiting to be discovered and rediscovered.
A decorative order of the highest order.
Treat your body and mind to a day out – or simply banish the last traces of Cartesian Dualism and immerse yourself, soon.
http://www.liverpoolmetrocathedral.org.uk
An estate with a chequered career.
Once a beacon of Modernist design, now a listed concrete grid, in arrested decline, an essay in status and stasis, high above the city of Sheffield.
A handful of former residents of the once acclaimed social housing, cling to the western edge.
Phase one of the Urbansplash redevelopment has carefully coloured in a portion of the eastern corner, then exited, their cladding tucked tightly under their arms.
Impasse.
All tinned up with nowhere to go, to walk the walkways, is to enter a ghost town, where no tumbleweeds tumble. Billy the corporation cleaner is happy to work alone, sweeping the empty spaces.
“Some don’t like working up here, I don’t mind my own company. Even if there was just one resident left, we’d still have to keep the place in order. You’d love my house, it’s an Army Barracks in the centre of town. Wife’s the caretaker, been in her family for three generations.”
This is the second of three visits I have made from across the Pennines.
Mark – “Why are all these photographers coming here from Manchester?”
“Been here some time, this is the second flat I’ve had, just missed out on one of the new ones though. Had this one nine years. Bloke threw himself off last week, he had a wife kids, parked up and just jumped.”
Take a look around.
The dissipated filling, in an Aldi and Tesco sandwich, a flat roofed, concrete and brick sixties shopping development, a precinct.
Small towns typically comprise of several retail developments, of various vintages, chasing diminishing returns, in ever expanding rectangles.
Stalybridge is no exception, once a bustling mill town, it sought salvation in a hedonistic mini-break by the River Tame, party industry.
Stalyvegas.
The bright lights of the society of the spectacle, now extinguished, burnt brightly in Bar Liquid, Club Rififi, H2O and Amber Lounge.
Walking the streets today, a meagre spread of shoppers, hardened daytime drinkers and lost souls.
Bids were made for a Portas Pilot, Mary contrarily resisted.
The Northern Powerhouse hits the buffers.
The Buffet prevails.
Tucked away in an arcade, far from Arcadian – not far from Baz’s Off Licence.
The launderette.
Yet another testament to the partial persistence of industrial technology.
No Longer in Use.
A happy hotch-potch of signs, surfaces and sixties design.
Informal formica, stripped bare strip lighting, wobbly laminate walls.
Watch and wait, whilst the World and your washing whirl.
Ups ‘n’ Downs, it’s had its share of ups and downs.
Quite literally – the former Wellington Inn has an upside facing onto the busy A6 Wellington Road, and a downside opening onto Mersey Square.
Its fortunes similarly something of a rollercoaster ride, from busy town centre pub, to edgy pseudo-club, populated by late night uniformed bus drivers, swaying on the metre square dance floor.
Latterly something of a disco party bus, going nowhere fast.
Known variously as Glitz, Bentley’s and the Bees Knees.
Finally, partial occupation by a forlorn pound shop – defying economic trends by closing.
An architectural curiosity and a blank faced, gap toothed greeting to the Town’s visitors, there is talk of conversion to flats under the council’s stewardship.
It seems like up to me.
Confusion
Fusion
Confusion
Imagine
A single storey brick built street corner boozer, it’s not so hard to do.
It’s Sheffield let’s call it the Whetstone, how appropriate.
Bored?
How about the Moorfoot Tavern?
Sounds classy, that’ll do.
Well it did until it didn’t, somehow it migrates south, then west.
Paris Texas – how about Rome Mexico Yorkshire?
El Paso it is then –
There there are 98 stops on the 192 route, between Manchester and Hazel Grove.
– I know because I walked them all.
Sunday morning roads relatively free of traffic.
Some stops peopled some not.
Zigzagging the A6 to record a consistent sequence.
The bus stops here.
Standing on the corner watching all the world go by.
Reflecting on and reflecting it’s older neighbours.
State House Dale Street.
“Built 1962 to the designs of Edmund Kirby & Sons. It has an assertive service tower, apparently clad in polished granite. Unusually, above the entrance is a concrete slab with a relief depicting what looks like a coat of arms above the building’s name. Kirby’s practice moved into the building for a time.”
Three well proportioned volumes – a central service tower, main block and outriding, lower level base.
An exciting conflation of grids, contrasting in scale and finish.
As ever – go see for y’self.
I want it.
Historic England want it.
Hopefully you and the people of Sheffield want it,
– anyway it’s listed.
http://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1393220
“1964 by George S Hay, Chief Architect for CWS, with interior design by Stanley Layland, interior designer for CWS. Reinforced concrete with Blue Pearl granite tiles and veneers, grey granite tiles and veneers, buff granite blocks, glass, and brick.”
The Liberal Democrat Council objected, saying
“It could be a major barrier to regenerating Castlegate.”
There is now the possibility of redevelopment as a creative hub.
It was a Co-op on the grandest of scales.
It has it all, public art, monolithic proportions and finish, bags of detail and scale in abundance. A fascinating building to explore and certainly one that fills my little heart with joy in superabundance
A building of period distinction, it deserves its preservation.
We do not require another patch of steel and wilfully wayward clad nowheresville non- architecture, replete with aspirational retail agogo.
Go see it soon!
Moments from the centre of the City, bordered by dual carriageways and a substantial roundabout, sits a most remarkable building.
What is it?
It’s almost unfathomable.
A carpark lacking entrance and exit, abattoir, contemporary art space?
No – an electrical substation, on such a colossal scale as to relieve you temporarily, of a gasp or two.
Finished entirely in unfinished concrete, a great volume, broken by vertical and horizontal lines, punctuated by intermittent abutments.
Accessed externally via a most extraordinary glazed and enclosed staircase.
Wisely Historic England have had the site listed:
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1415383
“Electricity substation. 1968 to designs by consulting architects Jefferson, Sheard and Partners, Sheffield, led by Bryan Jefferson, in association with the Regional Civil Engineers’ Department of the CEGB North East Region. Contractors, Longden & Sons Ltd, Sheffield. Reinforced concrete frame with board-marked finish with formwork bolt marks, construction and daywork joints emphasized, concrete floor slabs, blue engineering facing bricks, cladding panels of Cornish granite aggregate.”
Go see for yourself, if you don’t believe my eyes.
Manchester Orbital – a coach trip around the outer and upper limits of the city’s Modernist Architecture.
Organised by the Manchester Modernist Society
http://www.modernist-society.org
“Seifert’s corporate buildings were regularly bold, those in Manchester no exception, but this is perhaps the most monolithic of his North-West schemes. The site, in a depression adjacent the River Irk in Blackley, was formerly owned by ICI, by whom the building was commissioned. At one time, a four storey ICI laboratory building by émigré architect Serge Chermayeff also stood close. Here, the simple massing, formed by the junction of horizontal and vertical volumes, bears several of Seifert and Partners trademark gestures; the hexagonal geometries, the cut away sections of wall to form entrance ways between structural elements, and the repetitive facade. The end wall is reminiscent of Tolworth Tower, also by Seifert. The tower and podium configuration is a product of the brief; the machine hall had to be at ground level and have no construction above. The narrow tower has no internal columns, the structural grid is mirrored in the services arrangement and the two co-exist outside the usable volume of the laboratory space, in the walls and floor. This solution is expressed in the deep reveals of the main façade, services travel vertically between the window modules. Whilst somewhat hidden, the building reveals itself fantastically from elevated vantage points, the tram south from Bowker Vale station being one such location. Originally it was intended that four of these towers would be built and run along the river valley in some sort of massive futurist domino arrangement.”
With thanks to Mainstream Modern
http://www.mainstreammodern.co.uk/casestudies.aspx/Detail/72/hexagon-tower
Mid blue linoleum tiles, patched here there.
And everywhere.
Signs
Everywhere.
In an uncertain universe, you can almost always rely on the launderette, to guide you on life’s soapy journey, through a complex series of immutable do’s and don’ts, arrows, slots, buttons and bows.
Giant is the new big is the new large.
I feel so small.
Standing alone in an unattended laundrette can be a chilling experience, a heightened state of awareness abounds, accentuating that all pervasive absence of presence.
The unseen hand, that write the notes, that speak to you in emphatic hurried caps, pinned or taped precisely on the walls.
The ghosts of clothes, still warm, now gone.
A Proust defying amalgam of aromas, that almost fills the air.
Just you and a series of slots, demotic instructions, care worn utilitarian surfaces and time.
Wash Inn get out.
Early morning on the A30 out of Okehampton and something is beginning to stir.
Two inscrutable Romanians and a curious garrulous traveller are going about their respective business.
They – filling buckets and arranging a complex array of cleaning fluids.
Me – just mooching with a compact camera.
Initially expressing an understandable resistance to my snappy ways, their consent was granted, following a series of complex hand gestures, smiles, and an open and honest request.
Moments later my job was done and theirs had just begun.
Wash and go!
Hard by Stoke Minster stands the only pub in the area I care to visit, tucked in a cosy corner by the Civic Centre, five minutes from the station, barely time to work up a thirst.
Carefully and skilfully refurbished, exquisite original semi circles of stained and painted glass depicting the months of the year – though there is no February, the lower panes a recent addition.
A tiled floor and broad stripped floorboards beneath your feet.
Sympathetically furnished, plainly, simply appropriate to a pub with pride.
In being a pub.
We and the afternoon sun, spill lazily in, in time for a pint.
It’s delicious so we have another
And another.
http://www.joulesbrewery.co.uk/pubs/pub_details.php?id=9
Things come and go.
A former dock has surely seen its fair share of life’s ins and outs.
Things have gone.
Now.
Over your cities grass will grow.
Greening the ground.
The last lost posts still stand.
Idly meandering through Cliftonville, along Northdown Road, I chanced upon the most delightful of cake shop windows. Being something of an aficionado of cakes, shops and windows it seemed like an ideal opportunity to snap away, with customary broad-smiling, wide-eyed enthusiasm. Furthermore why not go in? I was met with the most charming of receptions from the patron Stuart Turner and staff – not unreasonably inquisitive regarding my impromptu picture taking, I explained my particular interest in the patisserie. The interior of the 50’s bakery, shop and café is perfectly preserved, with a little sympathetic restorative work. Well upholstered and formica topped the furniture is the finest of its kind, each table graced with fresh flowers, condiments and loving care and attention. An exquisite array of breads, pastries and cakes, resting on delicate doilies, displayed in glass fronted cases. I encourage you to visit, take tea, take cake, take away the fondest of sweet memories.
There’s a world going on underground.
At ground level.
Fenced off, rather poorly though.
Not much here to deter even the faint hearted urban explorer.
Find a gap and get in.
Join the taggers and lollygaggers,
Underground.
Mr Turner came here way back when,
The same sea lapped a different shore,
A gallery stands where he passed,
If passing pop in,
Or wander the perimeter in search of a sense,
Of well being, or otherwise,
Seeking a link with some not too distant past,
When a different sea lapped the same shore.
https://www.turnercontemporary.org
Modern Mooch 