I’ve passed by for almost all of its life, marvelling at its white modular space age panels. The wide paved piazza frontage affords the lucky viewer a full appreciation of its futuristic whole, a giddy mix of brick, glass and concrete optimism. Civic architecture has never seemed so sunny.
The interior lighting is straight out of 2001, white organic and fully functioning – the upstairs function room is available for functions at the junction of Market Street and Ashton New Road.
I saw The Fall there for the first time in 1978, suitably shambolic and suitably feisty.
Renamed the Droylsden Centre on one side, it houses the regulation issue of charity shops and empty units. The main building is home to the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, soon to relocate to a new build across the road. The Concord will then provide a home for the workers leaving the now demolished Tameside Council Offices in Ashton.
Some time ago, over a year ago or so I went to Wigan.
I found a pub, a launderette, several interesting groups of housing and –
A large concrete Civic Centre, built in the early 1970s under the auspices of the Mayor JT Farrimond, the foundation stone laid by Alderman Ernest Ball on 22nd April 1970 – a man who seems to have collected letters after his name just for fun.
A tight grid structure is broken up with chamfered window fames and a mix of concrete finishes, surfaces and textures, slipping neatly into the inclined topography.
A rather distinguished cantilevered canopy or two sit centrally over the entrance porch.
The building no longer offers public access, services having been transferred to the nearby Life Centre.
To wander the streets with a broad smile, open heart and eyes, is to enter into an unwritten contract with the unexpected and inexplicable.
Chance encounters with old, new or familiar friends.
Imagine my surprise, when for the first time ever I unexpectedly came upon these William Mitchell reliefs on Hope Street, whilst walking aimlessly away from Lime Street.
That sense of surprise has never diminished, my spirits lift and my smile broadens to a cheeky grin, my pace quickens in ever so eager anticipation as I approach.
Wrapped tightly around the low, low waist of the former Federation House – big, bossy and very, very beautiful – though at times obscured by more recent architectural intrusions.
The original raw concrete is now awash with washes of off-magnolia exterior emulsion.
Hughes and Willet were seemingly less amazed or amused, the opinion of the Aztecs, or for that matter the Neo-Aztecs, is sadly not a matter of record.
I remain impressed by the impressed concrete relief, a convincing addition to a sharp functional modern office block, all of which have not dated disastrously as soon as the fashion supporting it has collapsed.
Treat yourself take a walk, surprise yourself once in a while.
Aztec bars were withdrawn shortly after their launch in 1967.
The Aztec race was all but wiped out following their disastrous encounter in 1519 with the Conquistadors.
The William Mitchell reliefs prevail to this this day, as of last Sunday.
Kirklees College started life as Huddersfield Infirmary in 1831 up until 1967 when the Ramsden Technical College moved in, they paid £105,000 for the site.
In September 1968 the first students began lectures and the first new building on the site opened in 1969. The main new block was built in 1971 – the year the college became Huddersfield Technical College. In 2008 Huddersfield Technical College merged with Dewsbury College to form Kirklees College and relocated in 2013.
The campus incorporates 10 buildings over a 6.1 Acre site ranging from the old hospital complex to modern blocks of classrooms.
Some of the buildings have been used for the filming of the dramas Black Work, Remember Me where they changed some areas to be a care home, a hospital and a police station and the film Extremis.
The site is owned by Wiggett Construction Group, who have now confirmed they want to demolish the 1970s college buildings to make way for a Lidl supermarket.
Thanks to Derelict Places – they went inside, I didn’t, I don’t do that sort of thing.
I walked the lengthy perimeter, bobbing in and out of nooks and crannies in search of nothing in particular. Chatted to a Kirklees employee who had worked at the site, he regretted its closure and passing.
“This building had character, it was great to work here – now it’s going to be a supermarket.”
A curious amalgam of municipal classicism and hard edged 70s modernity, presided over by a sombre, care worn and patinated Edward VII.
Which seems both serendipitous and heartwarmingly convenient.
The bus station was opened on Sunday 1 December 1974 and is owned and managed by Metro. It is now the busiest bus station in West Yorkshire. The bus station is situated in Huddersfield town centre, underneath the Multi-storey car park. It is bordered by the Ring Road – Castlegate A62 and can be accessed from High Street, Upperhead Row and Henry Street.
There are 25 pick-up and three alighting only stands at the bus station.
Forever in the shadow of its Red Rose almost neighbour in Preston.
Some forty five miles and a fifteen and a half hour walk to the west.
Yet still a thing of beauty and a joy forever – given the recent repairs to the membrane covering of its multi-storey car park.
On the day of my visit it was clean, compact, cheerfully bustling and well used, passengers busy going about their business, of busily going about their business of going.
Light classics played soothingly upon the Tannoy, punters popped in and out of Ladbrokes, the kiosk plied its trade, the café was full and an air of calm, clear functionality reigned.
I don’t know much about the Yorkshire Building Society, I must say I have less than a passing interest in Building Societies generally.
I more of a building societies man myself.
But I do know this
In 1993 the former Hammonds Sauce Works Band was renamed as the Yorkshire Building Society Band. The building society supported the main band and also the YBS Hawley Band and YBS Juniors. The building society ceased its sponsorship in December 2004 although the YBS initials were retained in the band’s name until 2008. From January 2009 the band was renamed the Hammonds Saltaire Band.
Which seems a particularly cruel way, to treat a sauce works band.
Their former HQ has been standing on the corner, watching all the world go by.
Yorkshire is a county of market towns – Bradford is no exception, a mediaeval village expanding with the growth of the wool trade and the coming of the Industrial Revolution.
Flourishing.
The site was originally occupied by an imposing building of 1878.
Demolished in 1973.
To be replaced by a Brutalist build in the same year.
A structure of bold geometry, contrasting brick and warm, raw striated concrete.
The huge building, designed by John Brunton & Partners, was dubbed Bradford’s ‘space-age shopping centre’ when it opened in 1976. One of a series of American-style Arndale malls
Now the city council has purchased the centre for £15.5 million and agreed a deal that will see Primark – the largest of Kirkgate’s remaining stores – move to Bradford’s Broadway mall which opened in 2015.
The initiative will allow the authority to double the size of its proposed City Village programme, which it hopes will create better public spaces and 1,000 new homes in a ‘world-class sustainable urban’ across 5 acres of city centre land.
The interior has several decorative features, tiles their authorship and origins unknown, consisting of four 2.5 metre, and one 6.5 metre square ceramic panels.
Famed as an imaginary TV police station, this civic building is a civic building I simply can’t resist. I return on a regular basis to wander and snap. This is an open public space that seems little loved and has few visitors.
It is quite literally concrete poetry incarnate, a careful collision of form, tone, texture and line, softened with sympathetic planting.
There had been proposals to extend the Town Hall provison since 1945, which were finally realised in 1975. Built at a cost of £1,500,000 – to provide additional office provision for the Local Authority. A further two blocks were planned but never built.
Stopford House was built 1975 and designed by JS Rank OBE, Director of Development & Town Planning, Stockport Council.
The main block is clad in 1400 exposed aggregate precast panels and the link blocks have ribbed walls constructed with in situ concrete, bush hammered to expose the limestone aggregate. The precast panels were carefully matched in order to harmonize with the existing Town Hall, the mix contained coarse aggregate from the Scottish Granite Company of Creetown, a fine Leemoor sand from the Fordamin Company, together with white cement.
There are two levels of underground parking beneath the whole of the development. The piazza betwen the blocks was to have had a water cascde falling into a pond running the whole length of the area. Though exciting and expansive in the modern manner the piazza area, sadly, seems little used.
It needs a little love pop by and say hello sometime.
We can travel from pylon to pylon, spire to spire.
I espy water towers, and espouse the recording thereof.
I was first aware of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher many years ago, as a young art student I developed an empathy for their matter of fact photography, and a warm sense of the familiar with the largely industrial, everyday subject matter.
I have often made light hearted reference, to their austere conceptual grids.
The bungalows of Humbertson Fittes Lincolnshire
The British Rail freight van stables of Greater Manchester
And of course water towers, some are familiar to me in the areas around south Manchester, easily accessibly by bicycle across the Cheshire Plain. So over time I have set out with a clear intent or serendipitous disposition, a modern day Don Quixote, sans Sancho Panza, tilting and snapping at towers.
Access is not always easy, or permitted for that matter – there are gates and fences to overcome, brambles and barbed wire to catch yourself on, but it’s always worth it. As a typology they are various, in design, structure and materials.
Summer 2014 I cycled from Hastings to Cleethorpes, following where possible a coastal route, in search of nothing in particular. Needless to say I found several water towers, eight of note – amongst other things.
Cars and closures caused the station to withdraw up the road, to its current much smaller site.
Subsequently Fine Fare arrives with a fanfare of moulded plastic panels, and cast concrete walls.
Opened on May 22nd 1979 by the Goodies.
Superseded by Food Giant, Gateway, Dunnes Stores, Kwik Save and Somerfields – possibly others, currently Wilkinson’s Wilko Superstore and Age UK, retaining at all times the attractive integral car park.
Wilko is now to be relocated and the site redeveloped as part of the second phase of the £220m Talbot Gateway – whereby trams will link the promenade with the Station.
Possibly.
The tale is the typical mix of Council, Developer on/off, binary obfuscation, secrecy, smoke and mirrors.
Councillor Fred Jackson says:
“We are in talks with our development partner Muse but there is a confidentiality agreement so there is very little I can say.”
Whatever the outcome I do hope the panels are saved, having notified Historic England several weeks ago, I eagerly await their hurried and considered response…
In the meantime get y’self on the choo-choo to Blackpool North toot sweet, and have a gander at a fine Fine Fare plastic panel or two, before you can’t.
I’ve been here before, innocently snapping – without incident.
A super-large Roger Booth cop shop and courts, concrete combo.
So why not go back just one last time, prior to demolition and redevelopment.
So I did.
Following the acquisition and demolition of Progress House the Bonny Street Station is to be relocated, and the former site, under the ownership of Blackpool Council, set to become who knows what – who knows?
Progress House, Clifton Road, Marton.
The Council knows, it plans to develop a new site for the defunct Central Rail Station
A giant of the steam age that became a car park
It is 50 years since Central Railway Station closed with the land being used for a car park ever since. It was proposed as the site for the super-casino until that bid failed to win government backing. Since then plans for an indoor snow-based attraction have also failed to make any progress.
Today happily, snow-based attractions are still failing to make any progress.
Blue skies and chill early March air greeted me, across the wind swept, precast concourses and piazzas – warmish grey, against brightish blue.
I simply didn’t expect the boy in blue – ten minutes of light/half hearted interrogation.
“Who, what, why, where are you?”
Responding in a clear concise and non-confrontational manner, I was free to go about my legal business, taking these pictures for you.
It seems that post-war Lancashire police stations are under threat, often the work of County Architect Roger Booth, and to my mind buildings of both interest and quality, they are nevertheless disappearing fast.
Wigan is now a smart new hotel, now cracks a noble heart good-night, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest – in your merrily clad Premiere Inn.
Blackpool and Bury are both to be demolished.
What is going on, are we running out of crime?
On the day of our visit to Morecambe, there was no obvious evidence of miscreants on the prowl, though appearances can be deceptive -consider this incident of March 2008:
Morecambe Police Station was evacuated on Wednesday night after an elderly man took a suspicious package into the building.
Police said the man brought the object into the reception, said it was suspicious and quickly left.
Officers called the Bomb Disposal Team from Chester who said it was an ‘improvised device’. All houses near to the station in Thornton Road were evacuated and the area was cordoned off for two and a half hours.
The area was declared safe shortly before 8.30pm.
Further research reveals:
Though locals are also encouraged to use online services:
The modern day cop shop faces an uncertain future it seems. So get out there toot sweet, take a look behave responsibly at all times and remember folks it’s not a crime to snap a Bobby or their place of work.
It is not illegal to take photographs or video footage in public places unless it is for criminal or terrorist purposes.
There will be places where you have access as a member of the public, but will have to ask permission or may be prevented altogether. These could include stately homes, museums, churches, shopping malls, railway stations and council or government buildings. You need to check the situation out on a case by case basis.
Vauxhall post war housing development, including two adjacent tower blocks Haymans and Coverley Point. labelled as a concrete jungle home to mainly manual workers, forty percent non-white, amid a mix of Eastern European and Portuguese emigres.
Vauxhall playground of the free-runners, film location and thrill seekers:
Haymans Point is an imposing, concrete, council estate tower block in the north of Lambeth, part of the Vauxhall Gardens Estate, which has an active residents and tenants association. The rooftop is fairly restricted in terms of outlook due to its high walls, but some interesting features are available including atmospheric interior corridors, outdoor walkways and underpasses over public spaces.
– It’s also giving young Lambeth citizens work experience in the construction industry.
Vincenzo got his interest in construction from his Mum, who was a Brixton-based painter and decorator, and his original work experience with London charity Build-it was decorating Lambeth Council blocks in Blenheim Gardens. “I’m fanatical about learning things. I like moving about and in building you’re always somewhere different. Nadine from Build-it said this job would be hard work, so I was right on it”
Two blocks without a chip on their respective shoulders, set in a green sea of history.
Richard Seifert’s Space Tower what a pleasant surprise, as you veer slightly from Kingsway and collide happily with One Kemble Street, first meeting the smaller slab of Aviation House, then the conjoined concrete cylinder – the perfect none identical twin.
Part Marineville, part Seifert’s modular concrete, and Y shaped supports, a building Derek Meddings would be proud of, anything can happen in the next half hour.
Predating the current rash of Brutalist models, the child of the 60s never had it better.
Seifert designed 1 Kemble Street, then called Space House, in a drum shape to reduce the lateral forces that can stress a slab-like block thus reducing the engineering requirements and cutting the cost of construction.
He originally designed the building to be a proper tower almost twice as high that would have served as a luxury hotel, but objections from Camden Council saw it reduced in height to what has been built today.
Defining the look of 1 Kemble Street are the pre-cast concrete panels that clad the building, much in the same way as Seifert and Oldham Estate approached Centre Point.
Seifert’s signature Y-beams are also highly visible around the base of the building. Each of the modelled concrete cruciform units has a dimension of exactly ten feet in width and height and three feet in depth. Looking closely at the facade clearly reveals the grid of the building.
The Halifax was formed in 1853 as the Halifax Permanent Benefit Building and Investment Society. The idea was thought up in a meeting room situated above the Old Cock Inn close to the original Building Society building.Like all early building societies, the purpose of the society was for the mutual benefit of local working people.
Why are we not here?
In 2006, the HBOS Group Reorganisation Act 2006 was passed. The aim of the Act was to simplify the corporate structure of HBOS. The Act was fully implemented on 17 September 2007 and the assets and liabilities of Halifax plc transferred to Bank of Scotland plc. The Halifax brand name was to be retained as a trading name, but it no longer exists as a legal entity.
What have we here?
The Halifax Building was designed by the architecture firm BDP and constructed in 1968-74, as the headquarters for the Halifax Building Society and built with an unusually high budget. The rapid growth of the society over the twentieth century prompted the requirement for a new headquarters building, and in 1968 the aim of the architects was to design not only a practical building but a bold building for a confident client.
“Though necessarily large in scale, and centrally located in the town, the design is one of humanity, respecting both the townscape in which it was placed, and the employees it was to house…The high budget was reflected in the building’s finishes inside and out. Externally a limited colour palette and use of York stone cladding gave a homogeneity and showed consideration to the local character of the stone buildings of Halifax. Internally, materials were high quality and colour co-ordinated, with landscaping to both the public ground-floor spaces and the executive fourth floor.”
Ian Nairn thought well of it –
I wandered around amazed by the sheer mass of the main volume of the building, and the thin slithers of sunlight and blue sky which abutted its glass and stone skin.
When approached by a curious security guard, I quickly allayed his initial fears, on production of my Manchester Modernist Society membership card and badge.
However fellow urbanists, take care, for the public is often mutually private and public at one and the same time, don’t step over the line.
Set to the north-east side of the building’s entrance forecourt is a concrete sculptural screen wall by John McCarthy with an abstract relief to the south-west side facing into the forecourt. The wall is aligned at a right angle to the building’s main entrance and has a shallow rectangular pool (now drained) set in front. The wall includes numerous openings from which water originally flowed into the pool, but the system is no longer in working order. The pool also originally incorporated small fountains.
At a time when the whole of the centre of the city seems alive with construction, refurbishment, gentrification and more quarters than you could shake a stick at, this forlorn and seemingly unloved gem stands, shrouded in shrubs.
I’m a carpenter of love and affection, who would not care to see, this particular wall:
Beswick is a small district located on the east side of Manchester bounded by Ashton Old Road, Ashton New Road and Grey Mare Lane and was incorporated into Manchester in 1838. Pronounced Bes-ick the “w” is silent. Before 1066, in Saxon times, the district was called Beaces Hlaw – Hlaw was an old word for a small hill, often used as a burial mound. By the 13th century it had changed to “Beaces Wic” indicating that the area was predominantly farm land. Who or what the Bes element of the placename signified is open to interpretation, though the simplest and most plausible is that it belonged to a person called Bes or Bess.
In the 60s it was, as I remember it, a typically vibrant mixed East Manchester community, industry, housing, retail, entertainment and goodness knows what bumping along together incautiously, down tight streets of Victorian terraced housing. I worked in the area as a Mother’s Pride van lad, hauling bread, cakes and galvanised trays in and out of a plethora of superabundant corner shops.
The year of 1970, approximately, dawns, ushering in a decade of great change, slum clearance and the building of brand new homes – the end, by and large, of the back to back corner shop world.
10 years later, and long gone the years of postwar full employment, and the made round to go round world of the weekly wage.
The early 1980s saw growing unemployment and world-wide recession. The large new estates suffered most. Inner city districts of Manchester saw street riots in 1981, as did many other major cities around Britain. Manchester had suffered badly as a result of the recession. In 1986, over 59% of adult males living in Hulme were unemployed; in Miles Platting the figure was 46%; Cheetham Hill and Moss Side both had an unemployment rate of 44%. The main group of unemployed were young people under the age of 21. Hulme’s youth employment was recorded at 68%, and Cheetham Hill suffered 59%.
It is true that the new developments have great advantages in many ways over the terraces they replaced. Tenants who live in houses without baths or indoor sanitation and with no hot water are delighted to move into bright new flats and maisonettes, with indoor plumbing, with baths, and accommodation which has more rooms and far better kitchen facilities and central heating, even though they sometimes grumble at the cost of that central heating.
But although we can build a new housing development, we cannot easily recreate the warm community spirit which has vanished with the terraces which have been demolished. There is the noise from neighbours on the deck above and the deck below. The wind-swept balconies along which tenants have to walk are not as cosy as the streets from which they have come. Those welcoming corner shops, with their bright lights on winter evenings, have gone, and sometimes a new development has no new shops for too long a period. Even when they come, there are not enough of them.
The scale of the buildings is often daunting. I have in mind Fort Beswick and Fort Ardwick in my own constituency. The design is frequently all too forbidding. That is why the two estates are called Forts.
When the tenants of these development have lived in cosy old houses, however inadequate they were in terms of physical provision, they are bitterly disappointed by the shortcomings of new property which they have looked forward to occupying.
The year of 1990, approximately, dawns, ushering in a decade of great change, multi-storey development clearance and the building of brand new homes – the end, by and large, of the one on top of another topsy-turvy world.
Fort Beswick was subsequently demolished.
The beat goes on as Len Grant records the most recent redevelopment of East Manchester.
And the M.E.Nshouts loud and proud from the roof tops, heralding a brand new, privately funded public domain
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and as it would subsequently transpire, loosely attached Bison concrete wall-frame system panels.
Wythenshawe apart, the City of Manchester admitted that it had 68,000 houses described as “grossly unfit” by 1959.
Its solution was to demolish 90,000 dwellings between 1954 and 1976 and to erect 71,000 dwellings by way of high rise flats and to move residents out to newly prescribed “overspill” estates – at Heywood and Langley in the north, Hyde in the east and Worsley in the west.
Most of these displaced people, however, found themselves resettled in tall tower blocks, which, no matter how architecturally innovative, or how improved their facilities, proved disastrous in social terms.
In Coverdale Crescent Ardwick such an architecturally innovative development was built.
The estate, which became known as Fort Ardwick, was a deck access block of 500 homes. Completed in 1972, it was built with the same Bison concrete wall-frame system that had been used in neighbouring Fort Beswick.
By the mid-1980s it was clearly suffering from structural faults. The council employed a private firm of consultants to survey the estate, which found that water was leaking through roofs, steel fixings were corroded and concrete was breaking away. The council had to spend £60,000 immediately to bolt 1,100 panels back on to the building’s internal skin. The city architect, David Johnson, claimed that the report highlighted the rapid deterioration of Fort Ardwick’s fabric.
They said it was shoddy, thrown up, not enough care taken. The concrete panels weren’t made properly – the holes didn’t quite line up. You know what it’s like – you’re putting a flatpack cupboard together and something’s not in the right place but you just bodge it instead of sending it back, starting again, because you want the cupboard up and you’ve got other shit to do.
They had to get these consultants in, after they’d finished, to rebolt all the panels or something , so the whole thing didn’t fall down. Cost a bloody fortune my nan said, and that’s our taxes. And even then the rain got in. They’d put straw between the concrete, which sounds a bit medieval to me, and no-one wants wet straw walls, right? Cockroaches and rats and mould and that.
My nan remembers when they knocked down the terraces. I remember when they knocked down the fort. And maybe they had a point about it being shoddy, because soon as the diggers got their claws in, the whole thing fell to pieces, like it was made out of cardboard and bits of sellotape, not concrete and glass. A fort one week, a pile of rubble the next. No-one wept for it, they say.
I didn’t cry, but I stood at the end of the street and watched the diggers pawing at the walls, ripping the place to bits, our old kitchen wall gone and the cooker and the cupboards and the crap plastic clock just there for everyone to see. Except there was no-one else looking.
The passengers’ every need was attended to with alacrity and style.
“As a Stewardess your appearance was paramount, a beautician would come in during training to teach us how to apply make up.”
But it simply wasn’t enough.
The life of Christopher Cockerell’s bold British invention, was short and bumpy.
Genevieve Payne, a former stewardess:
“I remember the summer of 1979 as a year of really bad weather and rough seas.”
“I was working on a craft in a force 8, so on this day we were literally hitting the ceiling, passengers were throwing up everywhere.”
“One lady became hysterical I had to slap her to calm her down.”
By the 1980’s Pegwell and the hovercraft were in terminal terminus decline.
It’s a lot less bother without a hover.
What prevails is the shoreline, a concrete landing skirt and the slow process of reclamation, as nature decides that the council is quite right to decide to create a nature reserve.
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.”
Modern Mooch 