Category Archives: Norwich architect

Plans for a Fine City

31 Tuesday Jan 2023

Posted by in Norwich architect, Norwich buildings, Norwich history

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No Georgian new town arose in Norwich and what fresh development there was barely disturbed the medieval footprint [1]. The building campaigns of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries had a much greater impact as they cut through the narrow streets in response to the arrival of the railway, the electric trams and the construction of factories. In 1988, in conjunction with the Victorian Society, the late Rosemary Salt invited a reappraisal of the city’s Victorian and Edwardian architecture in an exhibition entitled ‘Plans for a Fine City’ [2]. I have been retracing her steps at the Norfolk Record Office.

Major changes to the traffic flow (horse-drawn and pedestrian) were forced upon the city by the arrival of the railways in the 1840s. A decade or so later, Prince of Wales Road – constructed on the rubble from the City Walls at Chapelfield – was built expressly to connect Norwich Thorpe Station to the city centre. Before the trains, London Street was a narrow medieval lane but in 1856 was widened to 15 feet (4.5metres) then to 35 feet in 1876. This removed most of the old buildings of which the Bassingham Gateway – now the Magistrate’s Entrance to the Guildhall – is a reminder.

John Bassingham of London Street was a goldsmith from the reign of Henry VIII. Carving renovated late C20.

In 1876 the local architect Edward Boardman designed the London Street Improvement Scheme, the initial phases of which cost £27,000. The new London Street was to form a spine of improved access for wheeled traffic between Thorpe Station and the marketplace but the larger vision included associated thoroughfares of Castle Street, Opie Street and Davey Place [2]. The determination to widen the medieval lane was reinforced by compulsory purchase orders as the new building line shows for Castle Street and the southwest end of London Street.

New building line in red. Three present-day shops in boxes. Edward Boardman 1876. Courtesy of Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/65/19

One of the first buildings to be raised (1876) was Howlett & Sons’ piano warehouse at the corner of London Street and the marketplace [2-4].

2-8 London Street. Built in 1876 as a piano warehouse. Courtesy of Norfolk Record Office BR 35/2/86/1-24

In Rosemary Salt’s words [2] ‘The building exists in mutilated form’ after the attic storey was removed and the facade – composed of carved red bricks from the local Costessey Brickworks [5] – was obscured by cream paint.

The stuccoed, four-storeyed building to the right of Costa Coffee as it turns around to face Gentleman’s Walk was designed by Edward Boardman in 1872, just before he began planning the improvements to London Street.

Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/31/8/1-25

The drawing shows a building profusely decorated with ironwork for this was the showroom of Barnard Bishop and Barnards whose Norfolk Ironworks was in Norwich-over-the-Water. They also had a showroom in London. Having written several posts about their designer Thomas Jeckyll I looked closely to see if any of his ironwork remained on what had become Hope Brothers shop. By the time of this photograph of about 1930 the ornate panels on the ground floor had disappeared; the cast-iron balustrades on the second floor balconies, which were designed by Jeckyll, remained but by the time George Plunkett visited in 1938 (not shown) these had disappeared too.

Hope Brothers on Gentleman’s Walk ca 1930, once Barnard Bishop and Barnards’ showroom. Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

The other corner of the London Street Improvement, at the junction with Castle Street, is currently home to Whittard of Chelsea. Built in 1880, its surface is also decorated with Cosseyware brick diapering – a feature the architect repeated in other projects, including The Royal Hotel (see below). While it differs in detail from the building at the other end – notably in the design of the window heads – both are built of red brick in a free Victorian Gothic style that promised a coherent approach to this block on London Street.

Boardman’s plan for Mr Beatley, hat manufacturer, hosiers, glovers and shirt makers. The three elevations wrap around the corner, from Castle Street (left) to London Street (right). Courtesy of Norfolk Record Office BR 35/2/86/11

In the top right-hand corner of the plan appears the signature of S(amuel) Gurney Buxton, chairman of the London Street Improvement Committee.

In the eighteenth century, when the Norwich and Norfolk wool industry was at its peak, Quaker families like the Buxtons and the Gurneys became wealthy by forming country banks that supplied credit to other weavers. These families were part of a network forged by business, Quakerism and intermarriage. In 1896, 20 such local private banks merged to form Barclay & Co Ltd, now the second largest bank in the country. Although Gurney & Co were only marginally smaller than Barclays their name is unlikely to have appeared in the corporate title for it was tainted by the failure of Overend Gurney & Co[6,7]. The insolvency of this, the City of London’s oldest bill-brokerage firm, drove investors to withdraw funds from other banks, spreading financial panic in what became known as the Black Friday of May 1866.

Samuel Gurney Buxton (1838-1909) of Catton Hall. Landowner, JP and banker. Credit: Roger Sharland

How grand a 100 yard-long arcade of Victorian shop windows would have looked in this stretch of the street. But this, it seems, was never part – or allowed to be a part – of Boardman’s vision. The differences in architectural detail between Messrs Howlett and Mr Beatley’s buildings, which bookend the street, are relatively minor and in keeping with another five-bayed red-brick building adjacent to Howlett’s piano store. Any visions of unity appear to have been dashed early on, however, by the insertion of a three-and-a-half storey building with projecting bay windows.

In yellow, two corners of the London Street Improvement scheme, early C20. Note the intervening building with protruding bay windows. From Castle street towards the Guildhall in the distance. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

Formerly the Midland Bank, now the HSBC, the building was unsympathetically resurfaced in 1971with ‘boldly projecting forms’ [3]. There it sits, glowering, proudly declaring war upon its Victorian neighbours. But Victorianism is less reviled than it was in the 60s and 70s and the failure to unify the street now seems regrettable.

The former Midland Bank remodelled in 1971

The widening of London Street at the junction with Castle Street and Swan Lane created an open space, the ‘generous 44 ft sweep’ [3] creating a latter day Norwich ‘plain’ [8]. Another one was created further east along London Street at the junction with Little Bedford Street, St Andrew’s Hill and Opie Street. Here, some years after the London Street Improvement Scheme, Boardman was to design the Eastern Daily Press Headquarters (1900).

Eastern Daily Press building 1900. Courtesy of Norfolk Record Office BR 35/2/71/7/1-25

This eclectic Arts and Crafts style is not typical of Edward Boardman’s output and may have something to do with the influence of his son, Edward Thomas [4]. The three projecting bays contain cartouches bearing dates: 1844, 1900 and 1960. The present building is of mellow stone on a dark granite base but in 1899 Boardman seems to have specified a different combination with a base made of Carrara Ware.

Developed in 1888 by the Head of Doulton’s Architectural Department, WJ Neatby, Carrara Ware was designed to imitate marble. Its weatherproof properties were exploited by George Skipper for the exterior surfaces of Norwich’s Royal Arcade, built where the Royal Hotel had stood [9]. Doulton’s records at their factory in Lambeth were largely destroyed in the Second World War, making it difficult to attribute their work to a particular building, but here we have a direct link. This photograph taken prior to the 1960 renovation shows a deep dark skirting beneath the windows that may well be the Carrara Ware specified by Edward Boardman.

57 London Street. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

It is hard not to read it symbolically but as one Royal Hotel – a traditional coaching inn – disappeared from the marketplace another of the same name was appearing at the top of Prince of Wales, a short step from the railway station. This was the tall red-brick Royal designed by E Boardman and Son (1896-7) [10]. As with the Eastern Daily Press building, the Boardmans turned to a so-called free Flemish style for this romantic Arts and Crafts building [8].

Plan for The Royal Hotel 1897 by Edward Boardman and Son. Norfolk Record Office BR/35/2/39/7

The lower levels are unadorned, but as you gaze upwards the extravagances of the Flemish Renaissance Revival come thick and fast in the form of ornamental brickwork (here, Cosseyware) topped off with pointed gables, towers and verdigris’d pinnacles [5]. As we will see, the busyness was antithetical to the plainness of Boardman’s industrial buildings.

Boardman’s practice probably designed more Victorian factories and civic buildings in the city than any other (see [10] for further examples). From 1876 the firm was responsible for designing what was to become the largest shoe factory in the country; by 1911 Howlett and White’s Norvic Shoe Company on St George’s Plain, Colegate, employed 1200 workers. This statistic holds a certain irony, for the production of factory-made shoes was now the major source of the city’s employment, replacing weaving that had been the basis of Norwich’s wealth for centuries. One reason advanced for the failure of the wool and silk industry was the reluctance of home workers to abandon hand-weaving in favour of power looms as used in the factories of the north-east of England and Scotland. Now, a few generations later, Norwich workers were making shoes in factories illuminated by electric light.

Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/59/17

In 1876 Edward Boardman drew up plans for the seven-bayed extension facing Colegate.

Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/59/17

In 1894 he added another eight bays separated from the 1876 building by a tower. At the foot of the tower a two-storey-high opening preserved the public right of way down to the River Wensum via Water Lane.

Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/59/17

The creation of Prince of Wales Road in the 1860s, followed by the London Street Improvement Scheme, helped the flow of traffic between Thorpe Station and the Marketplace but even more pervasive changes were needed to superimpose electric tramways upon a largely medieval town plan. Timber-framed houses were cut in half, an inconvenient savings bank disappeared, narrow roads were widened and two new streets were built [12]. The main entrance to the city from the south was via Newmarket Road and St Stephens Street; connecting this route to the railway station required the demolition of the east side of Red Lion Street and for a way to be pushed through to Castle Meadow. What arose behind the stepped-back building line of the new Red Lion Street was a thoroughfare designed by the city’s two foremost architects: George Skipper and Edward Boardman.

Plan for John Pollock’s veterinary practice in Red Lion Street by Edward Boardman and Son (1901). Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/81/14/1-15
The lettering above the arch is a relic from a century ago when this was a vet’s practice. Photo: 2017.

Adjacent to this was George Skipper’s Commercial Chambers. Faced in Doulton’s Carrara Ware, the narrow building is topped by a statue of the extravagantly moustachioed architect himself (for more on the flamboyant Mr Skipper see [13]). No uniformity here; the roofline is quite varied, from Pont Street Dutch to various shades of Baroque Revival.

Pollock’s red brick building is to the left. Skipper’s Commercial Chambers is to the right. Photographed in 2017.

Commercial Chambers was designed for the accountant Charles Larkin, the City Auditor, who had been Chief Clerk to Buntings, the department store where Marks and Spencer now stands [14].

Drawing for Commercial Chambers, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1903 [14]

Skipper also put forward a proposal for the next building along Red Lion Street – a bank.

Competition design by George Skipper for the Norfolk and Norwich Savings Bank in Red Lion Street, c1905. Credit: RIBA Collections

This competition plan was never realised; in its place Skipper recycled plans for a neo-Baroque building (D, below) that had been intended for the N&N Savings Bank in Stump Cross – the part of Magdalen Street that would be erased by the flyover of the 1960s.

Curls department store was bombed in 1942. Here, in 1955, before a new Curls (later Debenhams) building blocked the view, we see: A, Boardman’s Anchor Buildings for Bullards; B, Pollock’s surgery by Boardman; C, Commercial Chambers by Skipper; D, Bank by Skipper. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

The new bank (now Barclays) in Red Lion Street was itself a replacement for another branch of the savings bank (starred below) demolished in the Haymarket in order that trams could glide more easily around the corner to the central hub in Orford Place [12]. To ease this corner, Skipper designed a curved frontage for Haymarket Chambers (now Pret a Manger) on the opposite side of the street.

OS map 1885.
The curved frontage of 11 Haymarket Chambers 1896-1902 by George Skipper. Courtesy RIBA Collections

The suburbs of an expanding Victorian city were well served by the trams. The area immediately to the south west of the city had begun to fill with terraces after the sale of Unthank land in the mid-nineteenth century [15]. As a practising solicitor, Clement William Unthank had drawn up detailed covenants to preserve the appearance of terraces built on his land: to be faced in good white bricks; doorways arched in bricks; no gable peaks to the front of the house; nothing to project more than 18 inches from the building line etc. These were humble terraces whose austere frontages lent a Classical appearance. But the land on the Eaton Glebe Estate, further along Unthank Road, had belonged to the vicar of Eaton and architect Arthur Betts was free to design substantial red-brick villas in College Road with ‘the most unusual “cottagey” Gothic details’ [2], such as half-timbered attic gables and moulded brick string courses.

Designed by Arthur Betts 1891. NRO N/EN/12/1/2093
In College Road, red brick and bay windows differentiate these houses from the Unthank terraces

The railway and electric trams had significantly changed, not just the appearance of the city, but the lives of its citizens. Plans in the Norfolk Record Office show a structure in Unthank Road housing technology that would, over a century later, radically change the way we live now.

‘The Norwich’ telephone kiosk by Boulton & Paul (1909), installed for those who could not afford a private line. NRO N/EN/12/1/6701. It was situated outside 103 Unthank Road, now the Blue Joanna restaurant.

Thanks

It is a pleasure to thank the staff of the Norfolk Record Office for their assistance with this post. I also thank Clare Everitt for permission to use images from the invaluable Picture Norfolk website.

Sources

  1. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/11/16/georgian-norwich/
  2. Rosemary Salt (1988). Plans for a Fine City. Pub: The Victorian Society East Anglian Group.
  3. Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
  4. David Bussey and Eleanor Martin (2018). Edward Boardman and Victorian Norwich. Pub: The Norwich Society.
  5. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/05/fancy-bricks/
  6. https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/018fff83-0559-3218-8041-a3dfc8000622
  7. https://home.barclays/who-we-are/our-strategy/backing-the-uk/east-anglia/history/
  8. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2020/10/15/norwich-city-of-the-plains/
  9. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/03/12/the-art-nouveau-roots-of-skippers-royal-arcade/
  10. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/07/
  11. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/09/15/bullards-brewery/
  12. Frances and Michael Holmes (2021). The Days of the Norwich Trams: Transforming Streets, Transforming Lives. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects.
  13. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
  14. Citizens of No Mean City (1910). Pub: Jarrold and Sons
  15. Clive Lloyd (2017). Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle: The Expansion of Victorian Norwich. Available by mail order.

Georgian Norwich

16 Tuesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Norwich architect, Norwich buildings, Norwich history

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In 1505 and 1507 great fires swept away the majority of Norwich’s early medieval buildings and a new city – still largely timber-framed – arose on the old street plan [1]. Two centuries later, as historian Marc Girouard noted of the country in general, Georgian buildings were raised, ‘on medieval plots and incorporated a medieval, or at least Tudor, structure behind their new facades‘ [2]. Grafting new faces onto old frames was therefore not peculiar to Norwich; however, the lack of stone, in what was still the nation’s second city, meant that new classically-influenced buildings based on proportion and balance would be of red brick or plasterwork masquerading as stone. The straitjacket of a medieval street-plan, encircled for much of the Georgian period by city walls, meant that no new squares and crescents would be laid out, as in London, Bath, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Bristol. There would be no Georgian new town in Norwich.

Numbers 22, 24 and 26 Princes Street in 1936. © georgeplunkett.co.uk

There was a good example of Georgianification in last month’s post [3]. Where Norwich architect Cecil Upcher had restored the centre house above (No 24) by stripping it back to its Elizabethan bones, the house next door (No 26) had already been modernised by the Georgians who had inserted sash windows (although the timber-framed construction is betrayed by the jettied [jutting] first floor). That other trademark of the Georgian makeover – the Classical door surround – is out of shot but a stroll around old Norwich produces numerous examples of Georgian doorways – many retrofitted to older buildings [4,5].

Not long before the first George acceded to the throne in 1714, Celia Fiennes visited the city on her travels by side-saddle. She commented on the lack of brick buildings in the city centre, noting that what few she saw belonged to rich merchants in Norwich-over-the-Water.

‘… but all their buildings are of an old form, mostly in deep poynts and much tileing as has been observ’d before, and they playster on Laths wch they strike out into squares like broad free stone on ye outside, wch makes their fronts Look pretty well; and some they build high and Contract ye roofes resembling the London houses, but none of brick Except some few beyond the river wch are built of some of ye Rich factors like ye London buildings’ [6].

… they playster on Laths wch they strike out into squares like broad free stone.’ At the corner of Elm Hill and Princes Street

This house, with rusticated plaster-work designed to look like stone, was built about 1619 [7] and appears on James Cobridge’s ‘Mapp of the City of Norwich’ (1727). Subscribers who wanted their house to be depicted in the margins were asked to pay seven shillings down and three on delivery. Mr James Reeve should regard this as ten bob well spent since his house at the corner of Elm Hill and Princes Street is the only one that can still be recognised (although most churches remain) [8].

Note the number of grand houses with courtyards. Reeve’s house is outlined in red. Cobridge’s plan 1727. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council.
Captain John Reeve’s house in St Peter Hungate by James Corbridge 1727. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

Paradoxically, Mr Reeve’s house is the least grandiose of the illustrated buildings and we can only mourn the number of large C17-18 houses that we have lost. During the eighteenth century, most of the houses in Norwich-over-the-Water  were remodelled or rebuilt [7], no doubt on profits from a thriving textile industry. An example of contemporary remodelling is provided by 27-29 Colegate, ‘ … a seventeenth century timber-framed house raised a storey in the C18’ [7].

27-29 Colegate (with the six lucams or dormers) in Norwich-over-the-water.

St Giles Street is one of the most imposing Georgian streets, full of houses either built in the Georgian period or brought up to date with a new facade (usually involving an increase in height) [7].

The south side of St Giles Street, with the City Hall clocktower in the distance

Focussing on newly-built brick houses of the 1700s, Pevsner and Wilson [7] noted that none retained the old courtyard plan. Abandoned by the rich then filled with the shanties of the poor, numerous ‘courts’ or ‘yards’ were to become insanitary slums that lasted well into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the wealthy either retreated to their country houses surrounding the city or lived in their brick-built townhouses (stone being famously scarce in these parts). The wealthy master-weaver Thomas Harvey did both. He built a mansion just north of the city, Catton House, while maintaining a town house in the heart of the weaving district. This was number 18 Colegate, built in the early eighteenth century [9]. Thomas Harvey was the man whose collection of Dutch paintings influenced the co-founder of the Norwich Society of Artists, John Crome, who lived off Colegate [10].

No 18 Colegate. The threat of flooding from the nearby river accounts for the high steps up from the street.

Pevsner and Wilson considered 18 Colegate to be ‘(one) of the best early C18 houses in Norwich’ and awarded a similar accolade to Churchman’s House on St Giles Plain – ‘one of the finest houses in Norwich’ [7]. The imposing front we see today was added in 1751 by Sir Thomas Churchman in the course of remodelling his father’s house. Both this and Harvey’s house are seven-bayed but the pediment above the central three bays of Churchman’s House adds a more elegant top note.

In 1746, Churchman Jr planted a triangular walk of elms on nearby Chapel Field that he leased from the council [11].

The walk around a triangular avenue of elms in Chapelfield, just inside the city wall. The star marks the position of Churchman House. Note the proximity of the bowling green, theatre and assembly house. From King’s Plan of Norwich 1766, courtesy of Norfolk County Council.

This was the age of the promenade in which polite society paraded itself in the evening, or the afternoon in winter. In the provinces, polite society was mainly composed of the rising middling sort who looked ‘to register a cultural claim to gentility rather than one solely based on pedigree.’ Promenaders would take the air in their finery but, in this Second City passeggiata, as elsewhere around Europe, this could be read as a display of tribal affiliation in which a warm greeting or a curt nod betrayed your position in the social order [12].

In 1777, Parson Woodforde [13, 14], whose diary tells us so much about Georgian Norwich …

‘… went and drank tea this evening … with Mrs. Davy in St. Stephen’s Parish, with her, Mrs. Roupe, her mother-in-law and a very pretty young Lady from the boarding School. We took a walk afterwards in Chapel Field etc.’

In addition to drinking tea or coffee with friends, the leisured class could visit one of the several coffee houses around the marketplace [12,15]. There, they could read newspapers, gossip and – as unwitting participants in the English Enlightenment – discuss ideas that might have been considered seditious in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An Act of Parliament that restricted printing to London, Oxford and Cambridge had been allowed to lapse in 1695 [12] and Norwich was first to publish a truly provincial newspaper. By 1707, when only about six newspapers had established themselves in the provinces, Norwich had three of them. This was accompanied by a surge in the number of booksellers, which rose to 17 by the end of the Regency (1820) [12].

The Norwich Post, founded in 1701. On Norwich University of the Art’s Francis House in Redwell Street.

The east side of the marketplace was where the fashionable came to gaze into the specialist stores along Gentleman’s Walk – an early shopping parade. This print is a little later than the Georgian period but the discernible names give a sense of the shops along the Walk: Lammas Bros (tea dealers); Potter & Co (furrier); Sidney & Ladyman (also tea dealers); W Ringer (Berlin [wool embroidery] and fancy repository). Other shops from this period on the Walk include: confectioners; glove makers; coffee roasters; china dealers; mercers specialising in lace; hatters, and booksellers.

Shops along Gentleman’s Walk from a print by J Newman 1850. NWHCM: 1929.90.5.

From 1724, advertisements in the local newspaper invited Members and ‘Clubbers’ to listen to professional musicians at the Musick Night in Mr Freemoult’s Long Room [16].

Mr Freemo(u)lt’s House, which appears on Cobridge’s map above (five down, far right). Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

There was also music and dancing at assemblies, especially during Assize Week in early August, when county society came to town. The genteel could visit pleasure gardens, country cousins of London’s Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens (read [17] for the fascinating story of Norwich’s pleasure gardens). At Quantrell’s pleasure garden, for instance, the interval at concerts could be filled with humorous dialogues and songs, the evening completed with a celebration of military victories animated with illuminations, transparencies, capped off with spectacular fireworks.

But the days needed filling too. Visiting lecturers would expound on a range of advances in the natural sciences for this was the Age of Reason and the enlightened were hungry for Knowledge as well as Diversion. In one day in 1785 Parson Woodforde explored the two poles: he attended a lecture at the Assembly House on astronomy aided by a large mechanical orrery but in the afternoon he ‘went and saw the learned Pigg at the rampant Horse in St Stephens’ [18]. It was claimed this animal could spell, using letters and numbers placed before him. Could the paperweight I bought a few years ago be a souvenir of the Learned Pig?

I was prompted, in part, to write this post by a book on ‘Georgian Norwich: Its Builders’ by local architect, Stanley Wearing [19]. Before focussing on ‘the genius of Thomas Ivory’ he says a few words about the Norwich-born Brettingham brothers, Matthew (d.1769) and Robert (d.1768). During the building of Holkham Hall in north Norfolk, Matthew was assistant to William Kent – the man who introduced Palladian architecture to England – and managed the project for some years after Kent’s death.

Holkham Hall. Building commenced 1734, seen here in 1964 by ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

There is a small piece of Cow Hill, Norwich, that is forever Holkham Hall: this is Holkham House, built in the mid-eighteenth century. A green plaque states it was designed by Matthew for his brother Robert but Pevsner and Wilson are unsure which brother designed it [7].

Holkham House, 15-17 Cow Hill, Norwich, seen in 1935. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Provided they pledged an oath of allegiance, nonconformists were extended the freedom of worship by the Act of Toleration (1689). In the following century a new nonconformist chapel arose on Colegate – a manifestation of the strong current of dissent that ran through the city. Initially, Robert Brettingham was engaged as architect and surveyor but seems to have been discharged by a select committee. Thomas Ivory (1709-1799) then competed with a Mr Lee for the contract but it appears that Ivory’s ‘Moddle’ for an octangular building swung it for him [19]. Commissioned by the Presbyterians, Ivory’s new chapel of 1754 was said by John Wesley to be the most beautiful meeting house in Europe.

In 1751, six years after purchasing his freedom as a carpenter, 42-year-old Thomas Ivory was appointed to do ‘all the carpenter work’ in the medieval Great Hospital on Bishopgate. Ivory leased land from the hospital in order to build his own house, where he lived from 1756 until his death.

In the grounds of the Great Hospital in Bishopgate, St Helen’s House, built by Thomas Ivory, later expanded by his son William. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Ivory imported and exported timber from his business premises on Bishopgate; it was on this street that he also built what was probably his first major project in the city – the Methodist Meeting House or Tabernacle. His client was the Reverend James Wheatley, an Independent Methodist who had been expelled by Wesley from the Methodist movement for immoral conduct. Wheatley saved the money for his church, partly one feels, for his own protection; as an itinerant preacher he had been assaulted for his views [20].

The Tabernacle, Bishopgate, 1936, demolished in 1953. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk.

Wheatley’s Tabernacle was diagonally opposite the Adam and Eve pub, the oldest in Norwich.

The Tabernacle (red star), Adam and Eve PH (blue star). Is that Ivory’s timber yard on the right?1884 OS map

The three high points of Thomas Ivory’s building career are illustrated in the border of Samuel King’s plan of the city.

The Octagon Chapel, The Assembly Rooms and the Theatre, all by Ivory. King’s Plan of Norwich 1776. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council

Ivory’s two buildings dedicated to entertainment were on the Chapel Field Estate, perhaps the closest in Norwich to a Georgian enclave. Ranging from local aristocracy to merchants and manufacturers there were about two dozen proprietors of the estate, their aim being to create ‘a superior neighbourhood for leisure in the mid eighteenth century’ [12]. Along with a new bowling green, the remodelled assembly rooms were opened in 1755, adjacent to Churchman’s triangular walk [12]. The Assembly House was built on the vestiges of the ancient College of St Mary-in-the-Fields and Sir Henry Hobart’s mansion, already used for occasional assemblies. This was the town house of Hobart of Blickling Hall, who had been Steward of Norwich in 1595 and went on to become Attorney General. An anonymous tourist in 1741 had pronounced, ‘the buildings which have anything of grandeur in them are all Gothic’ but the Assembly House is a Georgian building of which Norwich could be proud, for – with the exception of Bath – no other city of its size could match it [7]. Due to lack of funds Ivory was unable to remodel the attached wings but this didn’t prevent the connecting doors from being thrown open so that dancers could form a line 143 feet long.

The Assembly House, designed by Thomas Ivory and Sir James Burrough.

The sculpture in the centre of the fountain is of a female putto made in the late 1930s by sculptor James Woodford, the man who designed the roundels on the great bronze doors of the City Hall (1938) and is thought to have made the two flagpole bases in the Memorial Garden outside City Hall [21].

Left: Putto outside the Assembly House. Centre: Robert Kett (who fought for the rights of the common people) from a roundel on the City Hall doors. Right: Assyrian-influenced figure, base of the flagpole, Memorial Garden. All attributed to James Woodford, late 1930s.

In 1757, on an adjacent plot, Thomas Ivory built the 1000-seat Theatre Royal, purportedly based on the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. As proprietor, he engaged the Norwich Company of Comedians to perform plays. To get around the inconvenient fact that only London theatres could be licensed to perform plays, he renamed his enterprise The Grand Concert Hall and presented free plays in the interval between the paid-for concert [22]. Norwich became the second provincial theatre to receive royal assent after an Act of 1767 allowed the licensing of theatres outside the capital.

Thomas Ivory’s original New Theatre in Chapelfield, 1758. Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norfolk Museums Service NWHCM : 1954.138.Todd7.Mancroft.44

The theatre was modified by William Wilkins in 1801 and rebuilt by in 1826 by William Wilkins Jr., better known as architect of the National Gallery. Wilkins’ theatre burned down in 1934.

Wilkins’ theatre of 1826 by James Sillett, 1828. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

In the 1760s, Thomas Ivory built a four-storey terrace in Surrey Street. Numbers 35/33 and 31/29 were completed in 1761 while 27/25 were built around ten years later, with the possible involvement of Ivory’s son William. Outside number 29 is a plaque recording that this was once home to Sir James Edward Smith, son of a wealthy Norwich textile merchant, who founded the Linnean Society and brought the Linnean collection to this city. The collection was comprised of Carl Linnaeus’s own ‘type specimens’ – the standards for each species. This was at the height of the world-wide collecting and gathering of plants and animals whose classification into groups paved the way for Darwinism. Smith also had what must have been a fascinating garden and, as a former plant scientist, I twitch each time I read that the garden was bought in the 1930s by the Eastern Counties Bus Company to build the new bus station [23].

Numbers 35/33 and 31/29 Surrey Street (with double porches) were built by Thomas Ivory. During a Baedeker raid of 1940 a bomb fell in the bus station behind numbers 27/25, and another fell directly outside, perhaps explaining why that end of the terrace was rebuilt in the 1960s.

In 1939, another red brick, four-storey building was raised on St Andrews Street, giving us the opportunity to look at the Georgian legacy in the twentieth century. This was the nine-bay Telephone Exchange built in the ‘Post Office Georgian’ style favoured by His Majesty’s Office of Works between the two world wars. The Georgian references are minimal (only three of the windows are encased in a stone architrave with a triangular pediment – and these aren’t real sash windows) but they are sufficient to disguise a high-tech building in comfortable traditional garb when it could (perhaps, should) have been clothed in a more challenging modernist style.

Telephone exchange in St Andrews Street, begun in 1939 but not completed until 1942 because of the war.

Around the corner from the Ivory terrace on Surrey Street, Thomas built a house for himself at the west end of All Saints Green, but immediately let it out in 1772 at £60 per annum to a Miles Branthwayte. From 1860, the house was to become the Norfolk Militia Artillery Barracks with sufficient land to provide for a parade ground and stables.

Ivory House, No13 All Saints Green, now apartments

In 1779, Thomas Ivory died of heart disease and is buried in Norwich Cathedral. Echoing Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St Paul’s Cathedral (If you seek his monument, look around), the Norwich Mercury wrote, Let his works speak for him [19].

Thomas Ivory’s wall memorial in Norwich Cathedral, carved by his nephew John Ivory ©Roland Harris

And if we seek a secular memorial there is St Catherine’s House. Thomas Ivory designed this building on All Saints Green but died during its construction. His son William completed it the following year [7].

St Catherine’s Close (1780) on All Saints Green; its ‘very pretty curved Adamish porch’, is a plaster replica after the original was damaged. The blank semicircular tympana above the ground floor windows are ‘an up-to-date London feature’ [7]. Now offices for Clapham & Collinge Solicitors.

©Reggie Unthank 2021

For your Christmas stocking. Published this year, my latest book is a collection of short, richly illustrated articles on the history of Norwich, including Mrs Opie’s medallion, angels’ ears, random walks, a half-size Pantheon and golden balls. Click here for a look inside.

Derek James of the Eastern Daily Press generously wrote, ‘It must rank as one of the finest books in recent times on the Fine City.’

The book is available in Jarrolds Norwich and City Bookshop Norwich. Click the underlined links to go straight to their mail order pages. It can also be bought in: The Bookhive, Norwich; Waterstones, Castle Street, Norwich; the Holt Bookshop; Ketts Bookshop, Wymondham, and ‘Bear’ on Avenue Road, Norwich.

Sources

  1. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2019/12/15/norwich-shaped-by-fire/
  2. Marc Girouard (1990). The English Town. Pub: Yale University Press.
  3. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/10/15/cecil-upcher-soldier-and-architect/
  4. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/26/early-doors-tudor-to-georgian/
  5. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/06/16/entrances-and-exits-doors-ii/
  6. Celia Fiennes (1698). Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, Being the Diary of Celia Fiennes. London: Field and Tuer, The Leadenhall Press, 1888. Available online: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/fiennes/saddle/saddle.html
  7. Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
  8. Raymond Frostick (2002). The Printed Plans of Norwich, 1558-1840. Pub: Raymond Frostick, Norwich, England.
  9. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2020/02/15/the-norwich-banking-circle/
  10. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/tag/norwich-society-of-artists/
  11. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/parksandgardens.htm
  12. Angela Dain (2004). An Enlightened and Polite Society. In, ‘Norwich Since 1550’ (eds. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson). Pub: Hambledon and London.
  13. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.227134/2015.227134.The-Diary_djvu.txt
  14. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2020/11/15/parson-woodforde-goes-to-market/
  15. William Chase (1783). The Norwich Directory. Online at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/62333/62333-h/62333-h.htm
  16. Trevor Fawcett (1979). Music in Eighteenth Century Norfolk and Norwich. Pub: Centre for East Anglian Studies, UEA.
  17. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2019/01/15/pleasure-gardens/
  18. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/02/15/parson-woodforde-and-the-learned-pig/
  19. Stanley J Wearing (1926). Georgian Norwich: Its Builders. Pub: Jarrolds, Norwich.
  20. http://www.methodistheritage.org.uk/norfolk.htm
  21. http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp
  22. https://www.norwich360.com/theatreroyal.html
  23. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/01/15/when-norwich-was-the-centre-of-the-world/

Thanks. I am grateful to Roland Harris, Norwich Cathedral Archaeologist, and Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk.

Cecil Upcher: soldier and architect

15 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in Norwich architect, Norwich buildings, Norwich history, River Wensum history

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Norwich was slow to find its way into the industrial world. Before the slum clearances, the city still had a timber frame: largely Tudor in appearance with Georgian contributions. Around 1900 the architect Edward Boardman introduced a glimpse of modernity with factories and offices built around steel frames with concrete floors, while George Skipper’s more exuberant projects added sparkle. The contributions of these two Norwich titans survived well, helping to define the city’s present-day character, but much of the fine texture from a century ago was built up by numerous smaller practitioners like Cecil Upcher.

Upcher was born in 1884 in Barnham Broom, Norfolk, where his father, the Reverend Arthur Charles Wodehouse Upcher B.A., was the rector.

Cecil Upcher’s father was rector of Barnham Broom or ‘Ryskys’ (which refers to the profusion of rushes on the riverbank [1]). The name ‘Wodehouse’ was introduced into the family by Cecil’s grandmother. Photo: Barbara Worland.

White’s Directory described Reverend Upcher’s home as ‘a spacious residence with pleasant grounds near the church’ [2]. The 1911 census records that the Upchers lived in the rectory with a cook, a parlour maid, a house maid, a kitchen maid and a nurse. They lived well, in a manner appropriate to the descendants of Abbot Upcher, the man who commissioned the Reptons to design Sheringham Hall and Park.

Abbot Upcher (1784-1819) by George Harlow ©National Trust

Having mentioned Abbot (his given name, not title) Upcher it would be wrong to cast him aside so soon for in some quarters he is the better known Upcher. The name Upcher may be a corruption of Upshire in Essex yet census returns find it most frequently – although still scantly – in Norfolk [3]. In 1812, Abbot and Charlotte Upcher bought their estate near Upper Sheringham on the north-east Norfolk coast. They engaged John Adey Repton as architect and Repton’s father Humphry to reconfigure the landscape.

Sheringham Park and Hall from Humphry Repton’s Red Book © National Trust

Humphry Repton (b1752), the foremost landscape designer of the late Georgian period, died in March 1818, seven years after being badly injured in a carriage accident. In less than a year Abbot Upcher, would also die, aged 35, never to live in the hall he had commissioned.

Abbot’s great grandson Cecil therefore came from Norfolk stock and it was as a Second Lieutenant in the 9th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment that he served in the Great War.

Second Lieutenant Cecil Upcher. Photo © Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum

Writing to his fiancée, Hilda Ward, he describes the conscripts as “a top hole lot of men all true Norfolk men” [4]. In his letters Upcher describes several of his billets; some he sketched.

© Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum

Since 1906, Upcher had been in practice in Norwich as an architect, specialising in church restoration. His professional training emerges in the sketch below in which he measured the accommodation provided by a dugout: beneath a ceiling four feet high were two beds, six feet long and two feet wide, separated by an 18 inch gap. His temporary refuges were drawn with precision but revealed nothing about the awfulness on the other side of the tin roof.

© Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum

Upcher’s letters convey the sense of the ironic, understated tone of the officer class – especially when wounded.

‘Monday September 27th 10am [1915]. In the train. Here I am on my way to England I believe. I got a bullet through the fleshy part of my left thigh. No damage and as fit as a fiddle. Feeling a bit of a humbug to be leaving it all, but walking is rather a job at present. We had to take a Bosch position at 7am yesterday Sunday morning and I got bowled over with a lot of others I fear [4].’

The voice will be familiar to readers of PG Wodehouse (and the name, Wodehouse, introduced into the family line by Upcher’s grandmother is inescapable here). When asked if he had taken part in the First World War, Bertie Wooster’s manservant Jeeves replied, ‘I dabbled in it to a certain extent, m’lord.’ (Ring for Jeeves, 1953).

By mid-1916 Upcher was suffering from deep depression and was invalided out with shell shock [5]. When he married Hilda the same year we see him holding a cane that seems too large for a swagger stick, suggesting he was still carrying an injury. Nevertheless, he returned to active service until the end of the war.

Cecil Upcher and Hilda Ward on their wedding day, Epsom, October 1916. © Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum

Upcher had been educated at Haileybury College, Herts before training at the Liverpool School of Architecture. Before the war, he was in partnership with Arthur John Lacey at number 6 Upper King Street Norwich. They specialised in church renovation and one of their last projects before the outbreak of war was the restoration of the ruinous St Martin, Overstrand.

St Martin Overstrand restored by Lacey and Upcher 1914. Photo: Wikimedia Commons by Stavros1

After the war, in the church in Upper Sheringham that housed the Upcher mausoleum, Cecil Upcher acknowledged men of the village killed in the war, by designing the oak pulpit and the foliate reredos above the altar.

And as a memorial to the men of the Norfolk Regiment who died in the Great War, Upcher designed a crescent of 12 alms houses in Norwich for disabled soldiers.

Memorial cottages on Mousehold Lane. Built 1920-1923.
In memory of the 6000 officers and men of the Norfolk Regiment who died in the Great War

The medallion of Britannia at the top of this memorial is signed by HA Miller who collaborated with Upcher on a memorial in the cathedral [6]. Herbert Miller (1880-1952), who trained at the Norwich School of Art, seems to have specialised in memorial plaques with portrait roundels, including: Amelia Opie on Opie House in Castle Meadow; John Sell Cotman on Cotman House in St Martin-at-Palace Plain; George Borrow outside George Borrow House in Willow Lane; and the Baptist preacher Joseph Kinghorn on a house in Pottergate near the Grapes Hill underpass [7].

After the Second World War Upcher was to design, for an adjacent plot, a range of six cottages for the wounded, funded by the public via The Home Guard. Distinguished by their Dutch gables, these cottages seem to belong to an earlier age; they appear less generous than the two-storey accommodation provided by the Great War cottages but were designed for the disabled as single-storey bungalows in order to avoid difficulties with stairs.

In July 1951, the Lord Lieutenant, Colonel Sir Edmund Bacon, dedicated the six new Memorial Cottages to the memory of the 2025 officers and men of the Royal Norfolk Regiment who died in WW2. Photo: EDP/Archant

Documents in the Norfolk Record Office confirm that Upcher’s practice was involved in all aspects of restoration in churches around Norfolk. They were not, however, restricted to ecclesiastical work; for example, Number 24 Princes Street is a Tudor building restored in 1932 by Upcher. Stripping the plaster from the front revealed the herringbone brick infill we see today. According to George Plunkett, the wooden lintel above the door came from a house in Fyebridge Street, once home to Edmund Wood who was Sheriff in 1536 and Mayor in 1548 [8].

Numbers 24 and 26 Princes Street, both restored by Upcher, in 1932 and 1956 respectively.

The repurposed spandrels of No 24’s door contain the merchants’ mark of the Worshipful Company of Grocers (top right, below). And around 400 years later, Cecil Upcher and builder Robert Carter left their names carved on the door jambs of the house in Princes Street.

The mark of the Mercers’ Company is also suggested to be represented somewhere [8] but the shield at top left contains a tangle of initials and not the maiden’s head that was, from 1530, the mercers’ mark, a fine example of which can be seen in nearby Elm Hill.

The Mercers’ Maiden, mark of the Mercers’ Company, on a beam above the alleyway by the side of the Strangers’ Club on Elm Hill. Post-1540.

Cley Windmill in North Norfolk also received Upcher’s attention.

Cley Windmill, converted to a holiday home for Mrs Wilson in 1921. Wikimedia CC BY 3.0 Stavros 1

In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the city was expanding beyond the city walls, the Trafford estate in the parish of Lakenham was developed on land owned by Edward Southwell Trafford. In 1919 his son, WJ Trafford, extended the estate around Eleanor and Trafford Roads and in the early 1930s Upcher designed a church for the new community. As one of the few churches built in Norwich between the wars St Albans was very much in keeping with the surrounding detached villas – comfortable yet somehow ’modern’.

St Albans on Grove Walk and Eleanor Road (1932-1938), taken in 1938 © georgeplunkett.co.uk

Pevsner and Wilson [9] called the style, ‘vaguely E.E.’, although the church’s rounded arches are clearly at odds with the lancets of Early English. By adopting a ’free’ Norman style, before the incursions of the architectural Goths, Upcher may have been differentiating his new church from the work of the Gothic revivalists of the previous generation. See, for example, the recent post on the campaign of Nonconformist church-building by Norwich architect AF Scott before the Great War [10]. Scott, incidentally, was still alive when St Albans was being built.

What the building is is vernacular. No imported stone here, its craftsmanship expressed in local materials drawn from Norfolk soil: unknapped flints with red-brick dressings. Pevsner and Wilson [8] described St Albans as being, ‘In the Maufe succession,’ suggesting a link with Sir Edward Brantwood Maufe (né Muff) whose first major commission was Kelling Hall in north Norfolk.

Kelling Hall 1913. Photo Wikipedia. Stavros1

Following Norfolk’s two other butterfly houses – Happisburgh Manor in 1900 (by Detmar Blow) and Voewood in 1903 (by ES Prior) – Kelling Hall was built in 1913 for the co-owner of the Shell Oil Company, Sir Henry Deterding. Like St Albans, Kelling Hall is clad in local flint pebbles and, in making the connection with St Albans, Pevsner and Wilson are placing Upcher’s church in the Arts & Crafts tradition.

Inside St Albans, the reinforced concrete ceiling in the chancel is a thing of beauty, predating the raw concrete of Brutalism by some 20 years – perhaps less a display of modernist leanings than an expression of the ‘truth to materials’ propagated by Pugin and Morris.

The woodwork in the chancel is reminiscent of the carving at Upper Sheringham.

At the east end of the chancel is a large painting of an epicene Christ in Majesty, floating over the view of Norwich from Mousehold Heath. It was painted in 1955 by Jeffery Camp RA in response to a competition by the Eastern Daily Press to provide a work of art above the altar.

Upcher also designed the vicarage next door.

Cecil Upcher is perhaps best known for his restoration of one of the city’s most photographed landmarks: Pulls Ferry on the eastern boundary of Cathedral Close. Norwich Cathedral is faced with Caen limestone, each piece of which was shipped across the Channel. The stone was transferred to low barges behind what was to become Old Barge Yard on King Street, allowing cargo to be delivered up the narrow canal connecting the Wensum with the stonemasons’ yard inside the cathedral precinct. In the fifteenth century a flat-arched Water Gate was built over the canal and the waterway itself was filled in ca.1780 [11].

PullsFerry3.jpg
The Water Gate, now known as Pull’s Ferry. The adjoining Ferry House (left in photo) was built in 1647 [8].

The crossing from the opposite bank of the Wensum was known for most of its life as Sandling’s Ferry [11]. This watercolour by Robert Ladbrooke, co-founder of the Norwich Society of Artists, shows us what the ferry looked like at the very beginning of the nineteenth century.

Sandling’s Ferry ca 1804-5 by Robert Ladbrooke, co-founder of the Norwich Society of Artists. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM: 2005.596.2

Sandling was superseded by John Pull who operated a pub here (Pull’s Ferry Inn or Ferry House) from 1796 until his bankruptcy in 1841 [12]. Pull’s Ferry operated until 1943 although it was already in ruin when Cecil Upcher drew the watergate in 1928.

Pull’s Ferry by Cecil Upcher, August 1928. Norfolk Record Office MC2060/1/8/1.

The Norfolk Record Office holds a small collection of photographs, possibly taken by Upcher himself. Wisely, they are sealed in plastic covers (I mention this to excuse the reflections on some of the following photographs). Upcher restored the house and watergate 1948-9.

NRO MC2060/1/6/2. Undated but assumed to be 1948, before work started,
The project was carried out by Robert Carter’s firm who had worked before with Upcher. NRO MC 2060 1/13/1
The Water Gate, before and after. NRO 2060/1/15/2 and 1/16/1
The watergate became the headquarters of Norwich Girl Guides Association in 1949. The renovation was funded by a bequest and with money raised by the Guides. This appears to be the opening ceremony. NRO 2060/1/19/2

The restored Ferry House became offices for Upcher’s architectural practice but plans show that much of the space was dedicated to a two-storey flat – the only evidence of business being the small typist’s room on the ground floor and the office upstairs. The largest upstairs room, labelled ‘J.F.W.’, was allocated to Upcher’s nephew, James Fletcher-Watson. The largest room on the ground floor was C.U’s.

NRO MC 2060/1/44/2

The photograph below, labelled ‘C Upcher’s room and armchair’, underlines how much space was dedicated to living accommodation.

NRO MC 2060 13/24/1
Cecil Upcher (centre) and colleagues at the Ferry House ca 1949. Photo: NRO MC2060/1/42/1

Standing on the left of the photograph is James Fletcher-Watson (1913-2004), with whom Upcher shared the practice. Trained as an architect under Edwin Lutyens, Fletcher-Watson is better known as one of the finest watercolourists of his generation.

Junk Shop, Cow Hill, Norwich by James Fletcher-Watson. Courtesy of Mandell’s Gallery, Norwich

Cecil Upcher died age 88 and is buried in All Saints Upper Sheringham.

©2021 Reggie Unthank

Sources

  1. https://www.hiddenea.com/Survey%20A%20to%20B.htm
  2. https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/NFK/Barnham_Broom/White1883
  3. https://your-family-history.com/surname/u/upcher/?year=1881#map
  4. Cecil Upcher letters Aug 1915 – Oct 1916. Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum.
  5. https://norfolkinworldwar1.wordpress.com/2015/09/
  6. Peter Bardwell’s Flickr page on Cecil Upcher: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132932913@N02/albums/72157682762647195
  7. Richard and Sarah Cocke (2013). Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk. Pub: Liverpool University Press.
  8. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/pri.htm#Prins
  9. Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I.Pub: Yale University Press.
  10. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/05/15/af-scott-architectconservative-or-pioneer/
  11. Frank Meeres (2011). The Story of Norwich. Pub: Phillimore and Co Ltd, Andover.
  12. https://norfolkpubs.co.uk/norwich/pnorwich/ncppfi.htm

Thanks

I am grateful to Kate Thaxton, Curator, Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum for background on Upcher; to John Snape and Barbara Worland for Barnham Broom history; and to Gordon Blacklock at the Norfolk Record Office for guiding me through the Upcher archive.

AF Scott, Architect:conservative or pioneer?

15 Saturday May 2021

Posted by in Norwich architect, Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 15 Comments

In the previous post on Norwich department stores I mentioned the architectural practice of Augustus Frederic Scott three times, more even than local hero George Skipper – and Edward Boardman not at all. Who was this architect whose factory building was described by Pevsner as the most interesting in Norwich and of European importance? [1] He was also big in Cromer where my interest had been piqued by two turreted houses that could possibly be by AF Scott.

AF Scott 1854-1936. From [2]

Scott was born in 1854 in the south Norfolk village of Rockland St Peter. His father, Jonathan Scott, was a Primitive Methodist preacher. The Primitive Methodists – sometimes called ‘Ranters’ because of their enthusiastic style of preaching – proposed a return to the original form of Methodism practiced by John Wesley.

AF Scott was educated at the ‘old Commercial School’ in Norwich [3]. This seems to have been the King Edward VI Middle School, established in St George’s Street in 1862 as an offshoot to the King Edward VI School (Norwich School) in the cathedral precinct. The aim of the Commercial School was to prepare boys for industry and trade, in contrast to the more classical education offered by the main school. The school was sited in the west range of the Blackfriars’ cloisters; it had 200 pupils, paying a tuition fee of four guineas per annum [4]. Now it is part of Norwich University of the Arts.

The Commercial School in the cloisters of Blackfriars’ Priory. OS map 1884, courtesy of [5].

This complex of buildings comes down to us as the most complete medieval friary in England [6]. Its survival can be attributed to the fact that in 1540, during the Dissolution, Mayor Augustine Steward spent £80 to buy the site for the city. Apart from being requisitioned as stables during Kett’s Rebellion the two halls have been in municipal use ever since. St Andrews Hall was the nave of the Dominican priory and its design as a large unencumbered preaching hall ensured it remains as one our largest public spaces.

In 1861 the architect to the trustees of Norwich School, James S Benest, began renovations in preparation for the Commercial School that opened the following year. He faced the west elevation of the cloisters with polychrome brick [7]. His additions are in the Gothic Revival style, one of very few examples of its kind in the city.

West elevation of the west cloisters of the former Dominican friary by JS Benest 1861

Scott continued his education at Elmfield College on the outskirts of York (92 boarders, £31 fee). It was also known as Jubilee College in recognition of the Silver Jubilee of the Primitive Methodists in 1860.

Scott was a man of strong beliefs: he would not allow his children to be vaccinated against smallpox; he was a life-long sabbatarian, and a vegetarian on moral grounds. He also abstained from alcohol, which led to him turning down invitations to design licensed premises [8].

Elmfield College near York. Courtesy of myprimitivemethodists.org.uk

But high principle seems to have tipped over into irascibility. A letter from the Carron Foundry, who were casting windows for Scott, complained that they ‘exceedingly regret to note the tone in which you write’ [9]. Cromer historian Andy Boyce told me, “… on at least two occasions (Scott) went to court for minor assaults, usually regretting his actions and paying any costs. On one occasion he manhandled a lady when she wanted a railway carriage window shut because it was cold (he insisted it remain open)”. Scott also held back that portion of the rates used to support Anglican Schools. As a result, bailiffs would come to his house and take away his pictures but he always seems to have bought them back [8]. In 1969 Scott’s family gave one of his paintings to the Anglican cathedral. It is by Amelia Opie’s husband, John.

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple by John Opie RA. In Norwich Cathedral.

Scott furthered his career as an architect by studying the practical side of the building trade with George Skipper’s father, Robert, in East Dereham [2]. He then spent two years with John Henry Brown who – according to Pevsner and Wilson – was one of the architects responsible for meddling with the west front of the Anglican Cathedral [6]. After two years with the Liverpool Corporation, Scott had sufficient experience to start his own practice at 24 Castle Meadow Norwich. For 17 years of this period he was also Surveyor of Cromer.

Scott remained at the Castle Meadow office from 1886-1927. He was joined by his son Eric Wilfrid Bonning in 1910 and when another son, Theodore Gilbert, joined around 1918 the practice was restyled AF Scott & Sons. In 1927 the Scotts’ offices moved to 23 Tombland [10].

23 Tombland. Courtesy of British Listed Buildings

In June 1882, Augustus Frederic Scott married Emmeline Adcock. Around 1900, Emmeline’s younger brother, Edward O Adcock, was to establish a gigantic plant nursery off Upton Road (see recent post on plant nurseries in Eaton [11]).

Augustus Frederic Scott was a familiar figure in his ‘wideawake’ hat with a three and a half inch brim that, from the defensive tone of his description, seems to have drawn comments. “My wide brimmed hat keeps off a certain amount of rain and sun and is of practical use. And moreover it suits me”[3]. He was also described as an enthusiastic cyclist, although the adjective doesn’t quite describe the arduous journeys on which he embarked in the early days of cycling.

JB Dunlop’s son on the first bicycle to be fitted with pneumatic tyres. ©National Museums Scotland

Scott claimed to have had the first bicycle in Norfolk fitted with pneumatic tyres. He cycled to Kings Lynn to catch the early train to Doncaster as well as cycling from Norwich to his office in Holborn Hall, London [10]. John Boyd Dunlop was awarded the patent for his invention in 1888, which suggests that Scott’s long journeys were made when roads were largely unmaintained and probably unmetalled.

Despite the notable exceptions, which come later, Augustus Frederic Scott is known as the designer of numerous non-conformist chapels around the county. These are included in Norma Virgoe’s non-exhaustive list [8] list:

West Acre (1887), Lessingham (1891), Garboldisham (1893), East Runton (1897), Postwick (1901), Lenwade (1905), Runhall (1906), Stokesby (1907), Billingford (1908), Fakenham (1908), Attleborough (1913), and Castle Street, Cambridge (1914) Primitive Methodist (PM) chapels, as well as Reepham (1891) and Cromer (1910) Wesleyan chapels. He also designed Cromer (1901), Dereham Road, Norwich (1904) and Wymondham (1909) Baptist churches. Lingwood PM Sunday school (1878) and Queen’s Road, Norwich PM Sunday school (1887) were of his design and so, too, were Wymondham Board School (1894), Ber Street, Norwich UM mission hall (1894-5), Botolph Street, Norwich clothing factory (1903), Bunting’s Department Store, Norwich (1911), Cromer cemetery chapel.

The first in that list is at West Acre in north-west Norfolk, now the home to the West Acre Theatre.

Primitive Methodist Jubilee Church 1887. Architect AF Scott

Before about 1840, non-conformist chapels were often rectangular and plain with the long wall as the dominant facade but through the nineteenth century the short gable end became the focal point [12]. Other denominations favoured Classical designs but through the nineteenth century until World War I the Methodists seemed to prefer the minority Gothic. And in his designs Scott showed an increasingly elaborate Gothicisation of the gable end as seen here in the Baptist church on Dereham Road. Pevsner and Wilson’s pithy entry reads: ‘Hectic Gothic front of brick and stone‘[7].

Dereham Road 1901. Above the pointed arches of the porch, note the repeated geometrical patterning (diapering) made from Cosseyware tiles. Scott made great use of this local material.

The same double-arched porch with a polished granite column, surrounded by Cosseyware diapering and crowned by a large window with Geometric Decorated tracery occurs repeatedly in Scott’s work. He used a very similar approach for the Methodist church in Attleborough, Norfolk, except the square tower was not extended by an octagonal lantern. Elsewhere he used variations on a theme – spirelets, pinnacles, turrets, steeples – to increase the upward movement of the gable end.

Attleborough 1913

For 44 years, Augustus Scott’s father, Reverend Jonathan Scott, tended his congregation in Thorpe Hamlet, a suburb to the east of Norwich. Too poor to have their own church his parishioners were, in 1876, allowed to pray in Blackfriars Hall, once home to the city’s Dutch Protestant community (see OS map at top). Money was raised for a new Methodist church to be designed by AF Scott and dedicated to his father. The Jonathan Scott Memorial Church is perhaps Scott’s finest church, built of red brick with stone imported from Ancaster in Lincolnshire – a more magnificent version of his chapel built the same time on Dereham Road [2].

The richly detailed Jonathan Scott Memorial Chapel (1901) on Yarmouth Road
Jonathan Scott Hall. Red brick, Ancaster stone, Cosseyware diapering, granite columns

The original plan was even more ambitious but the steeple was never built. In 1920, Scott entered into a severe dispute with minister Percy Carden, causing the architect to sever relations with the church he’d designed to commemorate his father.

Fundraising prospectus from Rosemary Salt’s book ‘Plans for a Fine City’, published by the Victorian Society [2]

Most of Scott’s buildings were in Norfolk though he did venture further afield. He designed Primitive Methodist churches in Walberswick, Suffolk (1910), Cambridge (1914) and two Primitive Methodist churches in Lancashire, at Thornton (1904) and Fleetwood (1908) [8]. A strong family resemblance starts to show through Scott’s gable end facades. Compare the Fleetwood church below with the Scott Memorial Church in Norwich, above.

Fleetwood, Lancs. © Steve Houldsworth

The white clay tiles on the church in Fleetwood (below) are identical to the kind seen at Attleborough (above). Scott’s practice necessarily had a close business relationship with ‘Mr Gunton, Cossey’. Hand-written letters show the architect asking for stop ends, mullions and string courses, describing pilasters and asking Gunton to ‘proceed with the Cossey Ware in white for the chapel’ [13]. By providing a ready shorthand for ‘Gothic’, Cosseyware had become an indispensable part of the architect’s palette.

The Guntons Brickyard at Costessey provided the Decorated tracery for instant Gothic, ‘in red or white‘.

From the 1903 Gunton Bros catalogue. Courtesy of Norfolk Heritage Centre

Before leaving for Cromer, let’s look at the little Swedenborgian Church on Park Lane, around the corner from where I used to live [2]. The Swedenborgian sect had had several homes in the city and came to this street due largely to the efforts of James Spilling, editor of the Eastern Daily Press, who lived on Park Lane. Spilling was a preacher and follower of Emanuel Swedenborg (theologian, scientist, philosopher and mystic) and raised money to build the little church. Scott was commissioned to design it in 1890. At one time Spilling preached in Glasgow: ‘Here the matter of his discourses gave the greatest satisfaction, but his East Anglian pronunciation was regarded as a drawback to his selection as its minister’ [14]. (After posting, follower Paul Reeve commented, ‘The Swedenborgian chapel on Park Lane was eventually bought by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the 1920s, and was their Norwich chapel until 1963 when they built a new complex on Greenways, Eaton, selling the Park Lane building to the Haymarket Brethren. Eventually it was sold to the owner of the house next door, who uses the former chapel for concerts.’)

Swedenborgian Chapel, Park Lane, Norwich 1890

Cromer became a boom town after the railway arrived in 1877 – its attraction boosted by ‘Poppyland’ columns in the Daily Telegraph in which Clement Scott (no relation) portrayed a North Norfolk idyll. George Skipper designed hotels here [15]. AF Scott & Son also designed hotels here but they must have been outraged when, just four years after the completion of their Cliftonville Hotel, rival Skipper was invited to give it an Arts & Crafts makeover. Skipper extended the hotel and altered the sea-facing facade, adding art nouveau touches in Cosseyware carved by James Minns of Norwich.

The Scotts’ red brick facade, just visible to the left on Alfred Street. Skipper’s modernisation on Runton Road (facing) has been overpainted.
Poppyland glass in the Cliftonville Hotel

Scott also designed the Eversley Hotel, which is now flats.

The former Eversley Hotel in Queen Anne Revival Style. Wikipedia CCBY3.0. Photo, stavros 1

Scott was Surveyor to Cromer Urban District Council and for a while ran his private practice from Church Street [16]. In addition to the hotels, he designed Mutimer’s department store, the old fire station, shops and houses. He also designed Cromer Cemetery Chapel, which gave him the steeple denied at the Scott Memorial Church.

Cromer Cemetery Chapel. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported licence. Photo, stavros1

In 1909-10, AF Scott built Cromer Methodist Church in red brick.

The Meeting House of the Baptist Church, West Street, Cromer. The facade is broken by two lancet windows and three wider Perpendicular windows (with flowing Decorated tracery) that accentuate the width of the building. Photo: Pike Partnership, Cromer.
Stained glass ceiling dome in the Baptist church. Photo: Pike Partnership.

Whenever I have driven down the hill into Cromer I have been intrigued by two very similar turreted houses flanking the entrance to Cliff Avenue. Now, with my head full of the spires and turrets of AF Scott I wondered if they could be further examples of the architect’s work.

Fallonside (No.25 Cliff Avenue) and Kingswear (No.30), on either side of the junction with Norwich Road, Cromer

It had been suggested that this non-identical pair of houses was by Scott [17] but local historian Andy Boyce now believes the attribution may not be correct.

Cliff Avenue is a late Victorian time capsule of fashionable housing for the affluent. Built between 1893 and 1905, it displays hallmarks of the Queen Anne Revival style although, a decade or so after the pioneering Bedford Park in West London, it represents a comfortable, more diluted version or, as Marc Girouard called it, ‘Queen Anne by the Seaside’ [18]. Expect to see red brick with white-painted trim, bay windows, monumental chimneys, hanging tiles and verandas.

While he was Surveyor of the Board (the predecessor to Cromer Urban District Council) Scott also designed several private houses in Cliff Avenue. Some members of the Board saw this as a conflict of interests but Scott replied that ‘When he agreed to take on the Surveyorship at such a low salary he expected that out of sympathy for him the Board would have placed private work in his way… he could not be expected to give his whole time for £45 a year’ [17]. A letter to the local paper complained that houses on Cliff Avenue were being built for a member of the Board by the Deputy Clerk to the Board under the supervision of the Surveyor of the Board (Scott). Moreover, the houses didn’t comply with the unpopular bye-laws that Scott had helped promote. A residents’ committee wanted to remove him as Town Surveyor [17].

Some of the houses attributed to AF Scott in Cliff Avenue. Clockwise from top left: No.4 Marlborough House; No.6 Tudor House; No.24 Cliff Mansions; No.23 Ruth House; No.11 Kingsmead

These houses for Cromer’s well-to-do were, like Scott’s churches, comfortable (that word again), even formulaic. It is hard to reconcile this side of his work with his excursions into the modern that we see elsewhere. The technology for reinforcing concrete with steel was developed in Europe and used in Britain in the 1890s. In 1903, Scott designed the first building in Norwich to be constructed with this material – Roberts’ print works in Botolph Street. Pevsner [7] thought it was the most interesting factory building in Norwich and an early example of European Functionalism, but this didn’t prevent its destruction in 1967 to make way for Sovereign House and Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Roberts the printers in Botolph Street (1903). Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

Listed for ‘its early contribution to the early development of the modern movement in England‘ is the old Citroën garage in Kings Lynn, formerly the Building Material Company. Heritage England say this is probably to a design by AF Scott [19]. Constructed in 1908, this early example of a concrete-framed building boldly displays its structure without the need for disguise.

33-39 St James Street, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Photo: Reggie Unthank

When Scott built a new department store (1912) in Norwich for Arthur Bunting [1] he designed a framework of reinforced concrete to which he attached a stone curtain-wall decorated – rather incongruously – with carved Adam swags. In 1942, German bombs devastated other buildings on St Stephens Plain. The non-structural walls of Buntings were blown out but the concrete skeleton withstood the blast, remaining as the basis for rebuilding. Minus the third floor and its corner cupola it is now a branch of Marks & Spencer.

Buntings on Rampant Horse Street in 1942. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

There are fleeting mentions of AF Scott in his latter years. There is a suggestion [2] that he was the architect of the Kiltie shoe factory in Norwich-over-the-Water; more certainly he was one of four local architects (including George Skipper) who were invited in the 1920s to design houses for the Mile Cross estate just north of the city [20], although it isn’t known which bear his signature. Augustus Frederic Scott died in 1936 but he had not been involved in the practice for a number of years. His sons continued as A.F.Scott & Sons and it was Eric Scott who designed the Debenhams building on Rampant Horse Street in the mid-1950s. The business was amalgamated with Lambert & Innes in 1971, forming Lambert Scott & Innes who, now as LSI Architects, have offices at the Old Drill Hall on Cattlemarket Street.

LSI Architects in the Old Drill Hall, Cattlemarket Street. The Crystal House is to the left.

©Reggie Unthank 2021

Sources

  1. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/04/15/norwich-department-stores/
  2. Rosemary Salt (1988). Plans for a Fine City. Pub: Victorian Society East Anglian Group.
  3. AF Scott obituary, ‘The Journal’ April 4 1936, p15. From britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich_School
  5. http://www.norwich-heritage.co.uk/norwich_maps/norwich_maps_finder.shtm
  6. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1220456
  7. Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
  8. Norma Virgoe (2016). Augustus Frederic Scott: A Norwich Architect in Lancashire. In, Lancashire Wesley Historical Society. Bulletin 62. pp21-24.
  9. Correspondence about the Co-op stables on All Saints Green, designed by AF Scott. Norfolk Record Office BR 309/1.
  10. https://nrocatalogue.norfolk.gov.uk/index.php/records-of-a-f-scott-architect
  11. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/01/15/the-nursery-fields-of-eaton/
  12. https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/iha-nonconformist-places-of-worship/heag139-nonconformist-places-of-worshipi-iha/
  13. Copies of Scott letters 1894-5. Norfolk Record Office MC 941/1, 810×6
  14. https://www.norwichchapelconcerts.org.uk/history-of-the-chapel
  15. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
  16. Cromer Preservation Society (2013). Cobbles to Cupolas: an introduction to buildings in Cromer town centre. CPS Guide #1
  17. Cromer Preservation Society (2010). Holiday Queen Anne: the villas of Cliff Avenue. CPS Guide #5.
  18. Marc Girouard (1984). Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement 1860-1900. Pub: Yale University Press.
  19. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1459413
  20. Mile Cross Conservation Area Appraisal #12, June 2009. Norwich City Council.

Thanks

I am grateful to Peter Forsaith, Research Fellow at The Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University for information on Scott’s connection with Lancashire. Andy Boyce, local historian of Cromer, provided background on Cliff Avenue. Pike Partnership provided background on the Cromer Methodist Church. Stuart McPherson (The Mile Cross Man) advised on the Mile Cross Estate. Alan Theobald is thanked for discussions.