The Cornerstone of the building was laid in front of a crowd of 2,000 on Good Friday 1859 and the church was opened for public worship on Good Friday 6th April 1860. In the press of the day, the church was described as – a Cathedral looking church.
Photo: Flickrcabinet photograph by Enos Eastham of Eccles.
In 1965 it was announced that a new Eccles motorway would be built through the church land.
Work began to demolish the Church and replace it with a new smaller church, but the old church did not go down without a fight as workers could not pull down the steeple. After eleven days of battering and buffeting by eighteen pounds of gelignite and two eight ton bulldozers, the steeple finally surrendered.
Then there wasn’t – then there was this:
On Friday 11th July 1969, the new church officially opened with a splendid ceremony. A minor hitch occurred when the organ blew a fuse during the second verse but the Congregation sang through it while organist Mr Kenyon frantically fumbled about and rectified the matter.
Single storey, square-plan pyramidal church with halls adjoining to SW.
Category B Listed
St Mungo’s Parish Church is a striking landmark in the centre of Cumbernauld. Prominently sited on the top of a small hill, the bold copper pyramidal roof is an important landmark. Alan Reiach designed two churches in Cumbernauld, both of which can accommodate 800, Kildrum Church – the earlier of the two. Alan Reiach 1910-1992, who was apprenticed to Sir Robert Lorimer 1864-1929, was primarily involved in the design of public buildings, including churches, schools, universities and hospitals. Noteworthy features of St Mungo’s Parish Church include the bold pyramidal roof, with apex of which forms a roof light lighting the nave of the church, and above this is a pyramidal belfry. The impressive Baltic redwood-lined interior gains natural light from the large central rooflight and clerestory windows.
Sunday morning in Glasgow, I caught the first train out from Queen Street Station.
In October 2017, a £120 million project began on bringing the station up to modern standards, demolishing many of the 1960s buildings and replacing them with a new station concourse, which was completed in 2021.
I arrived in Cumbernauld and walked toward the Central Way and back again.
Cumbernauld was designated as a new town in December 1955, part of a plan, under the New Towns Act 1946, to move 550,000 people out of Glasgow and into new towns to solve the city’s overcrowding. Construction of its town centre began under contractors Duncan Logan, chief architect Leslie Hugh Wilson and architect Geoffrey Copcutt – until 1962 and 1963, and later Dudley Roberts Leaker, Philip Aitken and Neil Dadge.
Designed by Professors Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein.
Grade A listed 1994 RIBA Bronze Medal
Should you so wish – jump the train from Glasgow Central, unless you’re already here/there.
Walk up West Mains Road, alone on a hill standing perfectly still sits St Bride’s, you can’t miss it.
The biggest extant example of Bricktalism, the most Bricktalist building in the world, possibly.
Stallan-Brand design director Paul Stallan commented:
St Bride’s for me is the most important modernist buildings of the period. The church made from Victorian sewer bricks and concrete is both simple and complex. The architecture continues to be a key reference for students of architecture from across the world interested in modernism and the contemporary vernacular in context. Andy and Isi’s work is as important to Scotland as Alvar Aalto’s work is to the Finnish.
It’s a traditional Scottish stone detail I saw for myself as a boy growing up in the Highlands, on every castle and fortified house, and on the flanks of the tower at Muckrach, ancient seat of the Grants of Rothiemurchus, built in 1598. This was my local castle just a mile from home.
The entrance to St Bride’s, I like to imagine, comes from a friendship that included travel in the Scottish Highlands, admiring the Scottish vernacular close-up, of a fevered conversation about a simple concept – the massive blind box, and how the application of simple, semi-traditional material detailing can make it all the richer.
St Bride’s is simply one of the finest buildings in Scotland.
I only worked there very briefly in 1965, to do my Test Desk Training. It was a pleasant, if too hot, place to work: I remember being taken out for lunch at the Grand on my first day – very nice!
One peculiarity, which always stuck in my mind, was the canteen, upstairs, where the men all clung to one side, and the women to the other, never saw that anywhere else.
I was a telephonist 1961 -1968, I married a telephone engineer, you are right about the canteen or kitchen upstairs. When I first started after I’d finished my training I was sent down to the test desk for a long stand. Being a naive little thing I did as I was told, then sent out for some sky hooks and hen party hens, the girls I worked with were a great bunch we had ball best working years of my life, still friends with some of the telephonists I worked with – happy days.
Walking down Dorning Street one day going back to work and on the pavement outside the Grand there was a half crown. Tried to pick it up to howls of laughter. The lads in the telephone exchange opposite had welded a nail to it and pushed it in the ground between the paving flags. Very funny, and no I didn’t get it out.
With narrow windows and inset light and dark tan tiles.
Prior to the exchange of telecommunications’ messages, the site was preoccupied by the exchange of partisan residents with a predilection for particular political persuasions.
Let’s back track along Dorning Street and follow the aroma of Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls – to the Santus Works and beyond.
There stands a concrete behemoth.
Which has of late been beset with particular problems of its own.
Minefield of lager cans near Wigan school sparks worryWigan councillors.
They are on a mission to stop the grounds of a derelict building, which lies just yards away from a school, being used as a drinking den.
Almost not quite in the shadow of nearby neighbour the Hanley Tower, this little gem sits tucked away by the side of Queensway, minding its very own business.
The business of telecommunications.
Just a short walk from the railway station let’s take a look.
The Roman Catholic Church of St Anthony’s, 1959-60 by Adrian Gilbert Scott, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
Architectural interest: the church has a strong composition and imposing presence derived from its bold design and cathedral-like scale, which is enhanced by the use of elegant building materials, including narrow and very pale buff bricks, Portland stone dressings and copper roofs, and a dramatic west end incorporating a giant camel-vaulted arch containing the recessed west entrance.
Architect: it was designed by the notable architect Adrian Gilbert Scott who trained under Temple Moore and specialised in ecclesiastical commissions for the Roman Catholic Church, and it is one of his major works.
Interior design: the elegant interior maintains stylistic continuity with the exterior through its incorporation of Gilbert Scott’s characteristic soaring camel-vaulted arches, which are derived from ancient Persia and are successfully reinterpreted here in a modern form; rendering the arches and treating them as parabolas. The dignified space is also enhanced by a dado of buff-coloured Hornton stone that contrasts with plastered walls above, and tall windows that serve to maximise light.
Interior quality: the interior decoration is kept to a minimum overall to enable the beauty of the building to be fully expressed, but the furnishings are of a high quality, including inset Stations of the Cross, an unusual carved wall pulpit, and an elaborate marble, gilded and mosaicwork baldacchino.
Historic England
Prior to the construction of St Anthony’s RC Church in 1959-60 Mass was celebrated first in two green Nissen huts knocked into one
I got on the 25 bus in Hanley and remained seated on the top deck until I reached Keele.
The chapel was just over the way from the bus stop, behind some trees.
Multi-denominational university chapel. 1964-65 by G.G. Pace. Blue vitrified engineering bricks. Slated pitched roof to eaves. Two copper covered pyramidal roof lights to paired towers and two copper-covered dormers. Rectangular building with paired apses at one end and a gallery along one side, with vestries and entrance below. Main space designed to be flexible, with movable furniture and a hydraulic screen which can be lowered to make two smaller spaces. One of the apses is dedicated to Roman Catholic worship; the other is for Anglicans and Non-conformists.
Exterior is dominated by the paired apses, which rise to form a pair of towers, each with panels of vertical strip windows with square-headed lights of irregular length, separated by brick tracery. Similar windows in irregular patterns to the flanks, which are otherwise unmodelled, and to the asymmetrical gable end. Rectangular leaded lights. Square-headed entrance on flank with concrete beam over. Double timber doors, recessed. Projecting concrete gutter spouts, three to each flank. Interior of exposed pink brick and unpainted board-marked concrete. `Y’ shaped laminated timber uprights and trusses, supporting timber roof, partly with timber rafters with exposed boarding behind, and partly with white acoustic tiles, forming a decorative contrast to the timber panels. Patterned brick screen with exposed, unpainted board-marked concrete frame divides the space at the higher level up to the roof, and a hydraulic screen of rust-stained timber, decorated with a cross motif, can be lowered to complete the division. Two similar, but smaller screens can be lowered to close off the apses.
Below the gallery a brick and concrete wall with groups of vertical windows. Broad, light timber handrail/bookrest, to `chunky’ concrete balustrade. Concrete pulpit of organic form attached to left of the screen wall. Also part of the Pace scheme is the limed timber altar, lectern, priest’s chairs, benches and other furnishings and the altars and furnishings in the semi-circular chapels. Also original are the pendant light fittings in black-painted metal. Floor with panels of parquet and polished concrete flags. Liturgically unusual as a multi-denominational chapel of this period, this impressive building is a fine example of Pace’s work.
Opened on 9th September 1928 with the silent film Lonesome Ladies.
The Carlton Picture Theatre in Anlaby Road was designed by the firm of Blackmore & Sykes and was built by Messrs. Greenwood and Sons.
It was run by Hull Picture Playhouse Ltd.
This was a lavish suburban cinema, with an elaborate green and gold sliding dome utilising Venetian glass and housing hundreds of concealled lights. Roman marble mosaics and painted plaster panels on the walls added to the sense of occasion engendered by a trip to the flicks.
A Fitton & Haley organ was installed, but this was later removed to the more central Cecil Theatre and was destroyed when that theatre was bombed during WW II.
The cinema had two entrances, one in each of the two towers on the front corners of the building. Above the proscenium was the inscription, rather inapt given how soon talkies arrived :
“A Picture is a poem without words”.
There was a single balcony and, for its date, a surprisingly large car park.
It continued unaltered, save for minor war damage, until its closure in April 1967, after which it was simply converted to bingo usage which continued as a Mecca Bingo Club until 2008.
This is an immense and noble building, a once great single screen cinema.
Unluckily closed for some thirteen years, now looking neglected and forlorn.
Tinned up and awaiting an uncertain future, planning was applied for conversion to apartments, it was refused.
It is unlisted and unloved in need of friends and funds, who could operate a cinema and theatre in the manner of The Plaza in my hometown of Stockport.
The number of cinemas in Hull peaked at thirty six in 1938.
British film making flourished during the war years and cinema attendances were much higher, but by the end of the Second World War there were only twenty five – several had been bombed.
In 1964 competition from radio and television, and latterly bingo, reduced the number of cinemas to ten.
Located twixt Bull Bay and Cemaes Bay, accessed whilst walking the Anglesey Coastal Path.
The area is rich in Quartzite, central to the production of Silica Bricks, which are resistant to high temperatures, much in demand at the height of the Industrial Revolution for lining steel furnaces.
The ore on the headland was first mined around 1850, with the ore being hewn out the living rock by hand.
A little railway brought the ore to the cliff above the brick works, then lowered by gravity to the works below, where the rocks would be pummelled and rendered to a size that could be further processed.
Mining by manual endeavour lasted from around 1850 to 1914, the hazardous harbour and alleged poor quality products hastening the enterprises’s demise.
Porth Wen brickworks was designated as a scheduled monument by Cadw in 1986 and classified as a post-medieval industrial brickworks.
A forgotten part of Warrington town centre could be turned into plush new affordable flats.
Developers are looking to put an eight-storey apartment block off Wilson Patten Street close to the former BT telephone exchange building – described in the planning application as an:
ugly concrete monolith
It would be home to a mix of forty one, two and three bed flats on the spare land which is currently used as a car park.
Typically the architecture of Twentieth Century infrastructure is reviled and ridiculed – simply swept away by contemporary, anonymous design and construction.
At least in this instance the developers intend to retain the ugly concrete monolith.
For me it is an essay in confident construction and decoration, the marriage of 1955’s brick utilitarianism, with a later concrete structure.
Poised on massive grey piloti, rising elegantly above the town.
When Hull City Council founded KCOM back in 1904, as Hull Telephone Department, it was one of several local authorities across the country granted a licence to run its own phone network.
Gradually, over time other authorities gave up control of their networks to the Post Office which wanted to create a single national service, but Hull City Council decided to keep its network and continue to go it alone.
While the Post Office network eventually became BT, Hull’s network, like the city itself, remained fiercely independent. That’s why today Hull has its own distinct cream phone boxes in contrast to the red ones you’ll find elsewhere.
1952 Call Father Christmas service was introduced.
Having heard of a recorded message service in Scandinavia, Hull Councillor J M Stamper suggested the idea of putting Father Christmas on the telephone. The Call Father Christmas service was introduced shortly afterwards, the first of its kind in the UK. By dialling a Hull Central number children could hear recordings of a Christmas story and carol singing.
The stories were written and performed by Hull Telephone employees.
The first story attracted 20,000 callers, with 35,000 customers the following year with calls and media interest received nationally and internationally.
The success of the Father Christmas service led to the creation of other recorded information lines, such as Bedtime Stories, Teledisc and Telechef.
This recipe line was introduced in 1950s and was still going strong until the 1990’s, with 50s recipes such as meat loaf and corned beef with cabbages being replaced by dishes such as Italian Chicken Bake.1964Celebrating our Diamond Jubilee with the official opening of the new Central Exchange and Head Office – Telephone House in Carr Lane Hull.
The work of City Architect A Rankine OBE RIBA2007 New company name as Hull City Council sell remaining stake.
The shareholders of Kingston Communications HULL PLC voted to change the company name to KCOM Group PLC to more accurately reflect the changing shape and geographic reach of the company.
Hull City Council sell remaining stake-holding in the business.
This is a fine building of brick, concrete, stone and steel, a restrained palette and commanding volumes, which asserts itself within the framework of the surrounding post-war architecture.
Well worth a walk around – let’s circumnavigate right now!
Good night all, sweet dreams and don’t forget to call Santa – hope that you all enjoyed your corned beef and cabbage.
The rising cost of repairs, combined with ‘a desire to progress’ with the regeneration of Droylsden town centre and the inaccessibility of the library’s T shape, three-floor configuration means that a ‘solution for the future of the library’ is now needed, according to the town hall.
Stockport Viaduct, carries the West Coast Main Line across the valley of the River Mersey in Stockport, Greater Manchester, England. It is one of the largest brick structures in the United Kingdom, as well as a major pioneering structure of the early railway age.
Stockport Viaduct was designed by George Watson Buck for the Manchester and Birmingham Railway. Work began in 1839 and was completed in 1840. Roughly 11 million bricks were used in its construction; at the time of its completion, it was the world’s largest viaduct and a major feat of engineering. The viaduct is 33.85 metres high.Stockport Viaduct is a Grade II* listed structure and remains one of the world’s biggest brick structures.
In the late 1880s, the viaduct was widened to accommodate four tracks instead of two. In the 1960s, overhead catenary lines were installed by British Rail for the West Coast Main Line electrification scheme. In the second half of the twentieth century, the M60 motorway was built, passing through two arches of the viaduct.
The structure is central to the visual landscape of the town – it has been the subject of both literature and art, most notably in the work of LS Lowry.
I believe that this composite composition of a northern landscape, is firmly embedded in the psyche of Stopfordians.
A notion that we are able to apprehend the whole of the structure in one panoramic sweep.
Our present perceptions are inextricably linked to past experience, possibly an illusory past.
