Plans for a Fine City

31 Tuesday Jan 2023

Posted by reggie unthank 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 197*1

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.

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

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.

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.

*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

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

Norwich Department Stores

15 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich Department Stores, Norwich history

≈ 18 Comments

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Bonds Norwich, Buntings Norwich, Chamberlins Norwich, Curls Norwich, Garlands Norwich, George Skipper, James Minns, Jarrolds Norwich, Woolworths Norwich

While reading about Parson Woodforde’s shopping expeditions to Norwich around 1800 [1] I was struck by the modest scale of the places he visited in the streets around the marketplace. This was still the age of the small shop run by – and generally occupied by – the shopkeeper and family, some of whom were the parson’s personal friends. The market itself offered everyday provisions: meat and fish, fruit and veg but a few yards away, separated from the everyday hurly burly of the market stalls, the genteel could stroll along the newly-paved Gentleman’s Walk and window-shop for luxury goods. Shopping had become fashionable in its own right. Displays would be seen through windows made of multiple, small panes cut from sheets of hand-blown glass. None of those shops survive in the city. Instead there are signs of the large Victorian shops and department stores that replaced them, with their huge plate glass windows.

CHAMBERLINS

One of the largest Victorian stores around the marketplace was Chamberlins at the junction of Guildhall Hill and Dove Street. At a time when Norwich had 124 small businesses listed as ‘drapers’ [3], Chamberlins the Drapers was on a different scale, selling a wide range of soft furnishings in several departments that ran the entire length of Dove Street. Chamberlins’ also had a furnishing department that stocked ‘one of the largest assortments of carpets, linoleum, floor cloths and furniture to be sold in the Eastern Counties.’ Now, instead of window shopping in the cold and wet, the citizens of Norwich could browse in the warm and take refreshments without leaving the premises.

Another special feature of this superb establishment is the refreshment room, which is a spacious room fitted up and furnished in the most luxurious manner, and in the best possible taste. It has a buffet, well supplied by the articles in request by ladies, and the proprietors disclaim any intention of making a profit on the refreshments here supplied, the department having been provided for the convenience of the country customers, many of whom come long distances, and who fully appreciate the consideration shown for their comfort.”[3]

Chamberlins was sold to Marshall & Snelgrove in the 1950s and the corner of the site is now occupied by a Tesco Metro (due to be relocated in 2022).

Chamberlins (left) decorated for King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935 (©georgeplunkett.co.uk). Note the siting of the war memorial against the east wall of the Guildhall before being removed to its present location opposite the City Hall of 1939. (Right): Today, the building is occupied by a Tesco Metro (©Keith Evans Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0)

According to Mason’s Directory of 1852, Chamberlin (Henry) Sons & Co were ‘Wholesale and Retail Drapers, Market-Place’ [4]. Henry Chamberlin founded the business in 1815. His descendants became members of the local establishment: Mayor, Sheriff and Deputy-Lieutenant of Norfolk. Some idea of the extent of their enterprise can be judged from the centre spread of this 1910 trade book [5].

*Top left: Chamberlins occupied much of the block from Pottergate (rear) to Guildhall Hill, including one side of Dove Street. Top right: their factory in Botolph Street*. *Lower: two of their trading floors [5].*

Chamberlins’ store was a product of the Victorian era but its factory in Botolph Street represented an excursion into modernism. Built in 1903 by AF Scott, it was described by Pevsner as the most interesting factory building in Norwich and of European importance [6]. Scott was to go on to design a department store using modern building techniques for Buntings (now M&S) in 1912 – its steel frame disguised behind a traditional exterior [7]. A vestigial Botolph Street lives on in the wasteland of Anglia Square but Chamberlins’ factory was demolished to make way for the blighted Brutalist HMSO building, Sovereign House.

*Built for* *Chamberlins’ in 1903, the factory at 30-34 Botolph Street was purchased by Roberts the printers in 1949 before being demolished as part of the Anglia Square development. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk*

The factory, which housed 800-1000 workers, was illuminated by electric lighting, proudly powered by a dynamo supplied by the Norwich firm, Laurence, Scott & Co [8]. Here, Chamberlins made a variety of clothing for the police and railways but during World War I, when they turned to war production, their entire output of waterproof clothing was requisitioned by the Admiralty [8].

*The Sewing Machine Floor at the Botolph Street Clothing Works. ©Norfolk Industrial Archaeology Society and Philip Tolley*

In 1898, Chamberlins was devastated by a fire that started in the premises of Hurn’s, ‘the oldest rope, twine, sack and rotproof cover manufacturer in the Eastern Counties’ – established 1812 [8]. The entire Dove Street side of Chamberlins and part of its opposite side were destroyed along with their neighbour, the Norwich Public Library, set back on Guildhall Hill.

Hurn’s rope-making factory, with its 200-yard-long ropewalk, was in Armes Street in the suburb of Heigham but the shop where the fire started was in Dove Street at the corner with Pottergate, or so it appears from a photograph in [8].

*Inside Hurn’s premises* *on *Dove Street* ca. 1904. ©Norfolk Industrial Archaeology Society*

After acquiring sites nearby, Hurns built new premises on Dove Street.

*Hurns new premises*, *built in Dove Street after the 1898 fire, were decorated with Cosseyware brickwork from Guntons of Costessey [8].*

As a result of this disaster, water hydrants and hose reels were installed at the end of each floor of Chamberlins new building. Their ‘Ladies’ Fire Brigade’ is seen here during the First World War.

*©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk*

BUNTINGS

In 1860, Arthur Bunting set up a drapery in partnership with three Curl brothers at the corner of St Stephens Street and Rampant Horse Street, where Marks and Spencer stands today. The collaboration did not, however, last the year and the Curls set up on the opposite side of Rampant Horse Street approximately (and we’ll come to ‘approximately’) where Debenhams is located.

As drapers, Buntings sold costumes, lace, millinery, costumes, mantles (sleeveless cloaks worn over outer garments), collars, yokes, frills, ruffles. Like Chamberlins, they had a furnishing department and a tea room. They also boasted ‘what the Americans call the mail order business … (with) the aid of well-got-up catalogues.’ Despite their motto of ‘Latest, Cheapest, Best’ [5], Buntings weren’t positioning themselves at the pile-’em-high end of the market for they had a Liberty Room in which the achingly fashionable Arts and Crafts of Regent Street were offered to a provincial public.

*London’s Regent Street in Norwich. A corner of Buntings’ Liberty Room displaying Persian fabrics. ca1908 [5]*

By 1913 all this was replaced by a modern four-storey building in reinforced concrete, designed by local architect AF Scott. The new Buntings was the self-styled ‘Store for All’ where customers were soothed by an orchestral trio from 12 to 6pm daily.

0 N — *Buntings 1935.* *St Stephens Street to the left, Rampant Horse Street to the right.* *©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk*

On the night of 29th April 1942, German planes dropped incendiary bombs. Three stores on Rampant Horse Street suffered heavily: Buntings, FW Woolworth & Co next door and Curl’s opposite.

Buntings was saved from total destruction by its reinforced concrete structure. It was refurbished but without the fourth storey and the corner cupola. In 1950 it was sold to Marks and Spencer. Its neighbour, Woolworths, was beyond repair as was Curl Brothers on the opposite side of Rampant Horse Street, and both were replaced with modern buildings [10].

WOOLWORTHS

I’m not including FW Woolworth & Co as one of the big department stores: it just happened to get itself tangled up with the history of two Norwich stores on Rampant Horse Street. Woolworths was more a five and dime store (or, in this country, threepenny and sixpenny). I remember Woolies as a place to buy ‘weigh-out’ roast cashews and pick n mix sweets, and where a friend of mine shamefully bought a cover version of a Beatles record. Below, is the Woolworths building (Woolies 3) that replaced the store built adjacent to Buntings in 1929 (Woolies 2) – itself an extension of the original Woolworths store on the other side of the road (Woolies 1, see Curls below). After acquiring their neighbour in 2002, Marks and Spencer now occupy the entire west side of Rampant Horse Street, from St Stephens Street to St Stephens Church.

*The postwar Woolworth photographed in 1986. Woolworth moved to St Stephens Street and the Rampant Horse Street branch was sold to M&S (2002). Photo: Archant Library*

While the new Woolworths building on Rampant Horse Street was being built, the staff were sent to work in the Magdalen Street branch. Opened in 1934 this store was in a medieval building now occupied by Spice Valley.

Spice Valley in Magdalen Street, the site of a *former* *branch of Woolworths.*

When the three Curl brothers parted company with Arthur Bunting, and moved ‘opposite’, they were unable to take over the prestigious corner site of Rampant Horse Street and Red Lion Street. As this photograph shows, it was occupied by a neo-Gothic branch of Woolworths that opened for business in 1914 – the first of three Woolies on this street.

The original 1914 Woolworths 3^d and 6^d store (seen here in 1924) at the corner of Rampant Horse Street and Red Lion Street. Another store (‘EWBY’, Newby?) is to the left. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

CURLS

By the time of King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935, Woolworths were no longer located in the corner building (right). Instead, they had moved in 1929 to larger premises on the opposite side of Rampant Horse Street, adjacent to Buntings. This was to be the branch of Woolies destroyed in WWII (arrowed). Saxone shoes and an insurance company now occupied the corner spot. So, could those be the awnings of Curls department store further down the street?

*Looking down Rampant Horse street from Westlegate* *in 1935.* Buntings (now M&S) is on the left-hand corner. The former Woolworths (Woolies 1) is on the right-hand corner; the arrow points to the larger branch (Woolies 2) that replaced it. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

Curls had bought a range of buildings including the old Rampant Horse Hotel that had been known as far back as the C13 as The Ramping Horse [8]. We have encountered this old inn several times. William Unthank (d.1800), the forefather of the Norwich Unthanks, was a peruke (wig) maker; he also owned coaches for hire. His address was given as Nos 2 and 3 Rampant Horse Street and, since the Ipswich coach left from the inn, it might possibly have been his [11].

*The site developed by the Curl brothers around the Rampant Horse Hotel. OS map 1884 courtesy of norwich-heritage.co.uk*

Curls had departments for china, glassware, furniture, millinery (hats), costumes, wallpaper, dressmaking etc. The Outfits Department was in the former billiard room of the Rampant Horse Hotel. Curls employed over 500 staff, including those at their factory in Pottergate [8].

Ironically, in a city whose once pre-eminent woollen textile trade was finished off by competition from the north, Curls had a Manchester Department that sold cotton products like flannelette and shirt material. The victory of cotton over wool was won in northern power mills centred around Manchester. For centuries, Norwich woollen and silk fabrics had been produced on hand looms but by the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century the city had been too slow to mechanise and confront the challenge. Although the lighter materials manufactured in ’Cottonopolis’ were highly popular with the public, their success was to a significant extent subsidised by the slaves who picked the cotton (imported via Liverpool) in the plantations of the West Indies and the southern states of America.

*The Rampant Horse Street facade of Curls illuminated by 11 Ediswan lamps, ‘each being of 200 candlepower.’ Shop decorated for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897.* *©Norfolk Industrial Archaeology Society.*

A fire insurance map* provides greater detail of the layout of the site in 1894. At this stage it is clear that Curls occupied only part of Rampant Horse Street, sharing that side of the block with Green’s the Outfitters (before they moved opposite Orford Hill), while the corner with Red Lion Street housed Colman & Co hardware shop. The Brigg Street facade, however, contains departments labelled ‘Millinery’ and ‘Fancy’ and would therefore seem to belong entirely to Curls. Surrounded by Curls is the CEYMS reading room. As part of the postwar rebuilding Brigg Street was widened and the initials of the Church of England Young Men’s Society are still to be seen on the side of the postwar building that superseded Curls.

* Charles E Goad Ltd produced detailed fire maps of most of the country and there are several sheets devoted to Norwich. At a time when high density commercial buildings and industrial processes were intermixed these maps provided important information on construction materials, water supplies/hydrants and neighbouring buildings. Every department store mentioned in this post has been been affected by fire.

Goad insurance map from 1894 when Curl Bros occupied much, but not all, of the block. The yellow line indicates Green’s the Outfitters before their move to premises between Haymarket and Orford Place. Courtesy of Thomas Barnes, Aviva. *©The British Library Board*

This map just missed the great change to the east end of the store when, in 1902, the Curl brothers remodelled much of the shop and built a new extension along Orford Place [8].

*Curl Brothers Limited, Orford Place frontage ca 1902. ©Norfolk Industrial Archaeology Society*

All of this was to change during the Baedeker raids of 1942.

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

For several years after the war, the block that once was Curls was just a (very large) hole in the ground, used as a car park and a water cistern [12]. In a remarkable act of familial cooperation, Jarrolds department store in London Street let Curls (to whom they were related by marriage) occupy the first floor of their London/Exchange Street premises. Curls then moved into property provided by Norwich Union for burnt-out businesses where they traded as ‘Curls of Westlegate’. Here, they sold children’s and ladies fashions, millinery and drapery while their furniture department remained at Exchange Street. Curls had to wait until 1956 for all departments to be reunited in the new store that had arisen on their bomb-damaged site. This steel-framed building, which Pevsner and Wilson judged to be ‘rather too bland … for its position‘[6], was designed by Wilfred Boning Scott(1858-1981), one of AF Scott’s two sons who followed him into the business. In the 1960s the department store was sold to Debenhams but continued trading as Curls until 1973.

*Curls building at the junction of Rampant Horse Street (left) and Red Lion Street (right). Designed by AF Scott & Sons* *for Curls,* *Debenhams since 1973*

Garlands

Richard Ellery Garland, born in Stroud, opened his own store in London Street, Norwich, in 1862 [5].

At 15, Richard Garland had been an apprentice draper in the London area. His own store in Norwich was to specialise in drapery but we see from this advertisement that Garlands were also dressmakers, mantle makers and milliners who sold ‘choice furs’, ‘dainty lingerie’ and corsets.

*‘The Great Blouse House’, 1910, from [5].* *Little London Street (‘Back of Jarrolds’) is to the left, London Street to the right*

By 1920 it had become a store with nearly 30 departments. The central bay of the London Street facade was very much as it appeared in the early 1900s but the Little London Street facade and the corner had been modernised.

*London Street facade of Garlands in 1935. Their decorations for King George V’s silver jubilee had just won second prize. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk*

In 1970, a chip pan fire in the kitchens spread to destroy the store, taking almost 70 firefighters three hours to get the fire under control [13]. Jarrolds pensioners can still remember being on the roof of the neighbouring Jarrolds Department Store, putting out sparks from the Garlands fire.

Garlands after the 1971 fire. The gutted building shows the modernisation that had taken place since the 1935 silver jubilee. The building just visible to the left, with C17 gabled dormers, was then owned by gents’ outfitters Dunn & Co; it is now part of Jarrolds Department Store. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Garlands was rebuilt in 1973 – its ‘castle-like sheer walls’ supported by a colonnade that provided covered access to the ground floor shops. Pevsner and Wilson [6] saw it as a ‘respectable attempt to introduce a modernist element‘. Garlands closed in 1984. The following year it reopened as Habitat, which occupied the upper floor until its closure in 2011.

*Garlands, 1973-1984, Habitat 1985-2011.*

BONDS

In 1879, Robert Herne Bond (b 1844) from Ludham in The Broads, started his business in Ber Street, Norwich, as a ‘Cash Draper’.

He sold the now familiar stock of mantles, blouse materials, furs, ribbons etc etc, except he differentiated himself from his rivals by claiming the largest stock of millinery in the eastern counties. According to their advertisements, all the large drapers in the city focused on soft furnishings for the house and clothing for women and children. Men were catered for elsewhere, perhaps in tailor shops, of which there were 83 in 1852 [4].

*RH Bond, cash draper of Ber Street Norwich [5].*

According to George Plunkett, in the late C19 a Major Crow owned 2-3 cottages on All Saints Green that he restored and converted to the Thatched Assembly Rooms. In 1915 it opened as The Thatched cinema before becoming Robert Bond’s ballroom and furnishing hall. Bond now owned properties that extended from Ber Street through to All Saints Green.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is all-saints-green-21-thatched-assembly-rooms-0595-1935-05-26.jpg — *Bonds restaurant, ballroom and furnishing hall at* *21 All Saints’ Green*, *photographed in 1935. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk*

*Air raid precautions, September 1939. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk*

Bonds was bombed in June 1942.

*Bonds 1942. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk*

After the war, Robert Bond’s son J Owen Bond, who had worked with George Skipper, designed a new store for his father. In 1982 it began trading as part of the John Lewis Partnership.

*Bonds of Norwich rebuilt (1946) in Streamline Moderne style by Robert Bond’s third son J Owen*

JARROLDS

London Street, which was originally known as Cockey Lane and London Lane, was a narrow medieval thoroughfare where pedestrians had to duck into doorways to avoid being crushed by carts [14]. There had been talk about widening it since at least the late C18 but this only happened in a piecemeal fashion: first in the mid C19 when the arrival of the railway created demand for better access to the market from Thorpe Station, then with Edward Boardman’s scheme of 1876 at the Gentleman’s Walk end [6]. By the time London Street had become the first pedestrianized street in the country (1967), Jarrolds – on the opposite side of the street – was the only original business remaining [6].

Jarrolds began life in 1770, in Woodbridge, Suffolk where 25-year-old John Jarrold opened up as a ‘Grocer, Linnen and Woollen-Draper’ in the marketplace [15]. In 1823 his son, also John Jarrold, came to Norwich. He announced in the Norwich Mercury that he and his eldest son John James were open for business in the city as ‘Printers, Booksellers, Binders and Stationers.’ This was on the Gentlemans Walk side of London Street, which was known at that time as Cockey Lane, after the cockey or stream that ran beneath the street. In 1840, John Jarrold and his four sons moved across the street to the present location. The illustration above shows that publishing and selling books remained their main business at the end of the century, detached from the fierce competition between the other large stores who focussed on drapery and millinery etc.

In 1896 the celebrated Norwich architect George Skipper was employing around 50 staff. His offices in Opie Street were now too small so he moved to 7 London Street where he became a neighbour to Jarrold & Sons. In 1903-5, Skipper remodelled the store and some of the changes to the London Street facade can be seen below.

Jarrolds’ corner after the first phase of George Skipper’s remodelling (c1909). The Ionic columns on the second floor (arrowed) and the semicircular window heads (outlined) show that Skipper had worked on the London Street side, but not yet on Exchange Street. Courtesy of Caroline Jarrold

Inside the new-look Jarrolds, circa 1907.

*Note the sign: Electric lift to Library and new select Reading Room*. Courtesy of Caroline Jarrold

*Father Christmas comes to Jarrolds. A sign in the London Street window advertises a new book*, *The Woman of Knockaloe, which was published in 1923. Courtesy Caroline Jarrold.*

Jarrolds today, in the free Neo-Classical style designed by George Skipper.

Skipper’s own offices, faced in carved red brick (Cosseyware), can be seen to the right and are now part of Jarrolds store. To the immediate left of the entrance canopy we see the 1920s continuation of Skipper’s remodelling. To the very far left is the extension of 1964. To the right are three gables of a late medieval building that became part of Jarrolds in 2004.

The semicircular bay above the main entrance anchors the store to the corner of the marketplace. The facade has been compared to a tiered wedding cake but is not topped off as Skipper had imagined. The architect had proposed a signature copper cupola [16] but in this case the clients refused to indulge him.

*Skipper’s plan for Jarrolds*. *Courtesy Jarrolds.*

The Exchange Street facade had to wait until 1923 for Skipper to complete the modernisation he had begun in London Street. The remainder of the block, down to Bedford Street, was at that time occupied by the Corn Exchange.

*1938, when the Corn Exchange (est 1861) still occupied the corner of Exchange and Bedford Streets*. *© georgeplunkett.co.uk*

In 1964, Jarrolds increased the size of the store when they bought the Corn Exchange and rebuilt on the site.

*Jarrolds’ 1960s* *extension on the old Corn Exchange site. Courtesy Jarrolds.*

One of the most distinctive features of the Jarrolds building is the carved brickwork on Skipper’s former offices. Although architects were not allowed to advertise their practice, Skipper commissioned Guntons brickyard in Costessey to carve six fired clay panels celebrating his work. Look up next time you walk down London Street.

*Upper panel: a top-hatted Skipper inspects a shield displayed by a carver. Lower: Skipper discusses plans.*

Regular readers may remember a previous post in which I described the character holding up the shield for Skipper’s inspection. Having just been sent a photograph of the shy Guntons’ carver, James Minns, I suggested that the terracotta carving represented Minns himself [16].

*Left: *the figure holding the shield*. Right: James Minns the senior carver, from a photograph c1900 from the Guntons Bros brickyard in Costessey.*

The head was a reasonable likeness of James Minns but the body was awkward and the large panel less convincing than its partner: heavy 3D modelling instead of low relief. In a further post, devoted to Minns’ life and work, I raised the possibility that this could have been an effect of the ‘senile decay’ given as one of the causes of his death in 1904 [17]. In his recent book on Skipper, Richard Barnes provides a further twist [18]. He cites Faith Shaw’s 1971 dissertation in which she mentions discussing the panels with one of Skipper’s foremen who recalled how, ‘everyone in the (Skipper) office shared in the carving.’ If, as it seems, the panels weren’t installed until 1903-4 it might explain why hands other than Minns’ were at work on the Cosseyware panels.

Sources

https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2020/11/15/parson-woodforde-goes-to-market/
A Comprehensive History of Norwich 1869. Available online at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44568/44568-h/44568-h.htm#page621
https://www.norfolkchamber.co.uk/about/history/sectors/retail/chamberlin-sons
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/62401/62401-h/62401-h.htm
Citizens of No Mean City (1910). Jarrold & Sons, Norwich
Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2020/08/15/twentieth-century-norwich-buildings/
Edward Burgess and Wilfred E Burgess (1904, reprinted 2014). The Men Who Have Made Norwich. Pub: Norfolk Industrial Archaeology Society.
https://www.norfolkchamber.co.uk/about/history/sectors/retail/buntings
https://wooliesbuildings.wordpress.com/2018/05/10/norwich-store-44/
A.J.Nixseaman (1972). The Intwood Story. Private imprint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_Brothers
https://www.edp24.co.uk/lifestyle/why-august-1-is-a-date-of-tragedy-over-the-1574906
Rosemary O’Donoghue (2014). Norwich, an Expanding City. Pub: Larks Press.
Pete Goodrum (2019). Jarrold 250 Years: A History. Pub: Jarrold & Sons Ltd. Can be bought online at: https://www.jarrold.co.uk/departments/books/local-books/jarrold-250-years-a-history-by-pete-goodrum
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2020/03/15/james-minns-carver/
Richard Barnes (2020). George Skipper: The Architect’s Life and Works.’ Pub: Frontier Publishing.

Thanks. I am grateful to Caroline Jarrold for providing photographs of the store. My thanks also to Rosemary Dixon of Archant and Thomas Barnes, Assistant Archivist at Aviva.

Twentieth Century Norwich Buildings

15 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Denys Lasdun, Edward Boardman, George Skipper, Rick Mather, Sainsbury Centre, The Forum Norwich

The confrontation between the Classical Revival (based on Greco-Roman principles of symmetry and proportion) and the Gothic Revival (based on the pointed arches and pinnacles of English medieval cathedral-building) dominated this country’s architecture in the nineteenth century. There is very little Victorian Gothic in Norwich but the Classical influence endured well into the twentieth century as the preferred style for temples of commerce. It took World War II and the post-war clearances before the modern took hold.

At the beginning of the century, George Skipper designed his masterwork for Norwich Union: “Without any doubt … one of the most convinced Edwardian office buildings [1].

George Skipper’s Surrey House for Norwich Union (now Aviva) 1904

In 1926, FCR Palmer and WFC Holden designed a ‘splendid’ building for the National Westminster Bank in London Street. Pevsner and Wilson wrote that it was modelled on a Wren city church: “One would assign a much earlier date to it [1].”

A Wren-like church in the first pedestrianised street in the country. Now the Cosy Club.

And as late as 1929 “a kind of Renaissance [1]” style was employed for the large Barclays Bank on Bank Plain that replaced the C18 bank of Gurney & Co, formed as an amalgamation of Quaker banking interests.

Designed for Barclays Bank by Edward Boardman & Son with Brierley & Rutherford of York, it was last used by the Open Youth Charity, now in liquidation.

Below, the Stuart Court apartments in Recorder Road show that the Arts and Crafts Movement also survived into the C20. These were built in the manner of almshouses by ET Boardman; he had married into the Colman family and designed the Dutch-gabled houses in memory of his brother-in-law James Stuart who had been concerned about the poor quality of housing for the elderly. The Dutch gables are a perfect example of vernacular revival in a city whose population at one time contained one third or more religious refugees from the Spanish Netherlands.

Stuart Court, designed by ET Boardman in 1914 but not completed until after the war

Behind the traditional facade the Stuart apartments were built around reinforced concrete but this material, and metal framework, had been used in the Boardman practice for decades. In fact a more forward-looking kind of architecture – neither Gothic nor Classical but proto-modern in the suppression of detail – had been introduced to the city by Boardman Senior with his factory buildings nearly half a century earlier.

Haldinstein and Bally shoe factory (1872) by E Boardman 2-4 Queen Street

In 1912, Bunting’s Drapers and General Warehousemen of St Stephen’s Street was constructed by Norwich-based architect AF Scott using non-traditional techniques. Here, an internal steel support was clad with stone curtain-walling but there was still a diffidence in giving it a more modern external appearance. Instead, the building was decorated in a genteel Classical Revival style, the stone panels beneath the windows carved with ‘Adam’ swags.

Buntings Department Store, early C20. It was to be bombed in WWII. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

The structure was topped by a cupola of the kind that George Skipper had used as a signature on his buildings around 1900 [3].

skipper cupolas2.jpg

‘Buntings’ site at the corner of St Stephens’ and Rampant Horse Streets is now occupied by Marks and Spencer, minus the dome. The more modern infill to the right is the former site of F W Woolworth.

After WWI the city’s priority was to build, in Lloyd George’s words, “homes fit for heroes”. This involved massive slum clearance followed by a programme of local authority house-building that led to 40% of the population living in council houses by the end of the 1950s [1]. The most notable of the municipal estates was at Mile Cross, north of the city centre (1918-20). This was the council’s first foray into large estate building, for which they engaged Stanley Adshead, the first Professor of Town Planning at University College London, who laid out the estate on Garden City principles [4].

Mile Cross 1928. ©http://www.britainfromabove EPW021219

Variety was achieved by modifying standard house plans. Local architects such as George Skipper (a long way from his ‘fireworks’ of the turn of the century) and AF Scott (better known for his work on Methodist chapels) adapted these to reflect early C19 Norwich neo-Georgian housing; others incorporated Arts and Crafts details, such as pin tiles on the first floor elevation that seem more reminiscent of Kent and Sussex than Norfolk [4].

While social housing was adhering to the traditional, a revolutionary new international movement was evolving. In 1927 the Bauhaus, founded in Germany by Walter Gropius, began teaching a new kind of architecture in which reinforced concrete was used to produce sweeping layers, its minimalist horizontal lines emphasised by long runs of ribbon window.

The uncluttered International style of the Weissenhof estate housing designed by Le Corbusier in 1927. Photo by qwesy qwesy. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported licence

It would be some years before the International style took hold in Norwich. Diffident nods towards Modernism were provided by the rounded steel windows of the Streamline Moderne version of Art Deco: first at the former Abbey National Building Society offices in London Street …

Designed in the 1930s by FH Swindels of the Boardman office who also helped design Barclays Bank to the left

… and in the Pottergate Tavern.

The Pottergate Tavern, now The Birdcage, 1930s

Pevsner and Wilson [1] presumed the pub to have been designed by J Owen Bond, a protégé of George Skipper, possibly because of the much larger building he is known to have designed with similar Streamline Moderne influences. J Owen, third son of Robert Bond, designed this replacement for his father, whose department store was damaged by bombing in WWII. A follower on Twitter said that her neighbour could see the flames from Arminghall, to the south of the city.

Bond’s of Norwich (now John Lewis) designed by J Owen Bond. One of the first modern buildings to spring up after the war (begun 1946).

By sticking with its medieval Guildhall throughout the C19, Norwich missed out on the grandiose Victorian town halls erected by its competitors in the industrial north. In the late 1930s Norwich did build a new city hall and Pevsner and Wilson [1] wrote that it “must go down in history as the foremost English public building of between the wars.”

Norwich City Hall designed by CH James and SR Pierce in 1931, completed 1937-8

The essentially plain style was borrowed from the Swedish Classical of Stockholm’s City Hall with the colonnaded portico of that city’s Concert Hall. But, because of these backward-looking references, architectural historian Stefan Muthesius felt that the term ‘modern’ didn’t quite apply to Norwich City Hall [5].

Instead, Muthesius awarded the accolade for the city’s first real International Modern-style to David Percival’s City Library, opposite the City Hall. Percival had come from Coventry in 1954, “then the hot-bed of civic-minded modernism”; as Norwich’s new City Architect he designed the new library, which was completed in 1962 and burned down in 1994.

Norwich Central Library destroyed by fire in 1994. City Architect, David Percival; Job Architect, Jim Vanston. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

Percival was responsible for introducing mainstream Modernism into Norwich’s postwar public buildings though he strove to soften its hard edges with regional references, especially on domestic-scale projects. By tempering Modernism with the local spirit, Percival is credited with pioneering the Vernacular Revival style [6]. The impact of massed concrete panels on the library, for example, was moderated by pre-cast panels of split-flint cladding (although a glance at the nearby Guildhall shows just how far this was from vernacular techniques).

Perhaps the most famous example of Vernacular Revival in Norwich’s public housing is the Camp Grove scheme off Kett’s Hill. Here, Tayler and Green’s signature decorative brickwork and patterned bargeboards – combined with changes in roof pitch, four different pantiles and 16 types of brick and flint – provide an unexpected degree of variation [7].

St Leonard’s Road 1973-6.

In contrast to the City Hall, Norfolk County Hall – built in 1966 in the International Modern style – never attracted much praise. Pevsner and Wilson dismissed it as “an ordinary steel-framed office tower.”

Norfolk County Hall 1966 by Reginald Uren. Photo: Keith Evans geograph.org CC BY-SA 2.0

Other forays into the International Style, such as the eight-storey block to the right of Skipper’s building for Norwich Union in Surrey Street, were also poorly received. Never one for mincing his words, Ian Nairn thought it “a completely anonymous slab” [8]. Evidently not a style for an ancient county town.

The 1945 City Plan envisaged a post-war Norwich in which the car played a major part [9]. In 1971 the inner ring road split Norwich-over-the-Water: the two halves were to receive different treatments. The northern half was to be the site of the Anglia Square development with a large cinema, offices, multi-storey parking plus that symbol of the new age – a pedestrian shopping precinct. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office at Sovereign House was a key part of the scheme and it was this New Brutalist building that marked the rise and fall of the site as a whole – the HMSO pulling out well short of its 40-year lease, leaving the building derelict by the new millennium.

The raw concrete and glass of Sovereign House by Alan Cooke and Associates 1966-8.

Currently, we await the outcome of a planning application to redevelop the entire Anglia Square site with 12-storey blocks and a 20-storey tower. The scale of the proposal shows that no lessons have been learned from the brief history of Anglia Square in which an ‘out of scale’ [10] development was imposed upon a historic site. For an appreciation of the Gildencroft area see [11].

There was no such grand project on the city side of the inner ring road and this part of Norwich-over-the Water fared better.

Inside the inner ring road, looking westward: in the distance, St Mary’s House; the glass and concrete St Crispin’s House; and the red brick of Cavell House.

In this snapshot from the evolution of office building, the 1960s curtain-walling of St Mary’s House on the far side of the St Crispin’s roundabout was succeeded by the 1970s layers of concrete and glass in St Crispin’s House, built for HMSO when permission was denied for an extension to Sovereign House at Anglia Square. A starker contrast was between the Brutalist concrete of St Crispin’s House juxtaposed against the red brickwork of 1990s Cavell House. This was part of what has been recognised as a “welcome softening of approach since the late 1980s” [1] for, as part of the Postmodern credo, Cavell House reacted against Modernism by providing local context missing from Anglia Square. Here, the windows on the upper floor referenced the long through-light weavers’ windows once common in this, the heart of the city’s textile trade. The flat arches heading the lower windows were borrowed from Sherwyn House, an old brush factory (now renovated apartments by Feilden & Mawson) further down St George’s Street. (See [12] for more about this district).

C20 Cavell House above, C19 Sherwyn House below

There was no such confrontation between new and old at the University of East Anglia where Denys Lasdun in the 1960s (replaced by Bernard Feilden in 1969), and Rick Mather in the 1980s, were able to build on a green-field site without planning constraints [1]. A Teaching Wall snaked through the original scheme, separated from the residential blocks by a first-floor walkway. Lasdun’s residences consisted of a cascade of study/bedrooms forming the ziggurats that have become emblematic of the UEA.

Denys Lasdun’s concrete ziggurats of 1966-7

As part of the second-phase of the masterplan, Rick Mather’s Constable Terrace echoed the serpentine form of Lasdun’s original layout but its smooth white rendering was a deliberate break from the hardline grayness of the earlier student housing.

Rick Mather’s highly energy-efficient Constable Terrace of 1991-3

Facing Constable terrace is the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1974-8). Designed by Norman Foster and Wendy Cheeseman, the tubular steel exoskeleton represents what is probably this country’s first use of High-Tech industrial architecture applied to a museum or gallery. The superstructure encloses a magnificent open space, some 130 metres long, that accommodates Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury’s art collection, along with university teaching areas.

The High-Tech Sainsbury Centre by Foster & Associates. The glass bridge is a continuation of the pedestrian walkway that winds at first floor level along the university’s spine.

Just squeaking in at the close of the twentieth century The Forum, funded by the Millennium Commission, was begun in 1999. Designed by Hopkins and Associates the Forum replaced David Percival’s flint-clad Central Library of the 1960s, destroyed by fire. This ‘Son of High Tech’ building [2] houses BBC studios, a restaurant, a café and what has become the most popular library in the country. The jaws of the horseshoe-shaped plan are closed by a glazed wall that – in a display of good manners – withdraws from, rather than confronts, the glorious St Peter Mancroft opposite.

©Reggie Unthank 2020

Sources

Nikolaus Wilson and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and the North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
Vic Nierop-Reading (2013). Twentieth-century Norwich in a nutshell. Norfolk Historic Buildings Group Newsletter No.25 pp 14-15.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
Mary Ash and Paul Burall (2019). Norwich leading the Way: Social Housing. Pub: The Norwich Society.
Stefan Muthesius (2004). Architecture since 1800. In, ‘Norwich since 1550’ by Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson pp 323-342. Pub: Hambledon and London.
John Boughton (2018). Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing. Pub: Verso.
Elain Harwood and Alan Powers (1998). Tayler and Green, Architects 1938-1973: The Spirit of Place in Modern Housing. Pub: The Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture.
Ian Nairn (1967). Norwich: Regional Capital. Reprinted, with an introduction by Owen Hatherley, in Nairn’s Towns (2013). Pub: Notting Hill Editions.
CH James and SR Pierce (1945). City Plan of Norwich 1945. Pub: Norwich Corporation.
Charles McKean (1982). Architectural Guide to Cambridge and East Anglia since 1920. Pub: ERA Publication Board.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/10/15/gildencroft-and-psychogeography/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/11/15/reggie-through-the-underpass/

Thanks: to David Rimmer, Martin Shaw, and Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk.

James Minns, carver

15 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by reggie unthank in James Minns carver, Norwich history

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Colman family, Edward Boardman, George Skipper, Thomas Jeckyll, wood carving

I’ve mentioned James Minns, ‘Carver’, a few times in these pages, always as an appendage to well-known local architects like George Skipper, Thomas Jeckyll or Edward Boardman, but I keep stumbling across his work and felt it was time that ‘Norfolk’s Grinling Gibbons’ [1] had a post of his own.

James Minns. From the East Anglian Magazine [1]

James Benjamin Shingles Minns – son of Sarah Shingles and James William Minns, cabinetmaker – was born in Lakenham, Norwich, at the beginning of 1825. ‘Minns’ is not uncommon in East Anglia and can be traced back to the Protestant Dutch ‘Strangers’ who brought the name here in the C16 , when it was Mins [2]. The 1841 census shows that James had two sisters; he also had two brothers, both of whom shared their father’s trade as cabinetmaker. Young James had woodworking in his blood.

E.C. LeGrice tells us that Minns lived in a house on Westlegate [1]. This house was ‘demolished – with several others – to make room for a modern block of shops’ but an old shop in that cluster ‘still remains … under the very shadow of the tower of All Saints Church’ [1]. That remaining building sounds very much like the thatched building below.

Westlegate 20 Barking Dickey Inn COLOUR [2957] 1939-04-12.jpg

Westlegate 1939, under the shadow of All Saints tower. The thatched building was once The Barking Dicky PH, now Waring’s Lifestore. The adjacent building (left) was demolished to make way for Westlegate Tower. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

(Just after this article was posted, David Vincent sent this photograph of Westlegate in 1890, as Minns would have known it before the street widening)

Westlegate 1890, courtesy of David Vincent.

The census gives no clue to when Minns lived here but in 1851 he was living as a ‘visitor’ in the house of dressmaker Frances Scales (widow) at 180 Kensington Place, near the junction of Queens Road and City Road. Genealogical records show that Minns married Elizabeth Emily Thompson in 1858 and, according to the 1861 census, was living at The Steam Packet public house. Confusingly, three Norwich pubs shared the name of the Steam Packet (a small boat regularly plying between ports) but, since a William John Shingles Thompson is listed as a proprietor of The Steam Packet in King Street [3], it would appear that this is where James Minns was living with his Thompson in-laws.

King St 191 Ferry Boat Inn [1286] 1936-08-16.jpg

The Ferry Boat Inn (1936), formerly The Steam Packet. 191 King Street ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Papers at the Record Office indicate that in 1864, James Minns – listed as ‘wood and stone carver’ – bought two ‘recently erected cottages, part of a row of eight’, for £150 from the builder Edward Burton [4] . Numbers 9 and 11 were in Arthur Street, a cul-de-sac off Mariner’s Lane, which at that time connected Ber Street on the high ridge down to King Street on the riverside. So Minns moved up the hill from his in-laws’ riverside pub

Mariners Lane once connected Ber Street (red) with King Street on which the Steam Packet is marked with a star. Minns lived in a block of 8 new houses on Arthur Street (purple). 1907 OS map courtesy of https://maps.nls.uk/.

Amongst Minns’ conveyances in the Norfolk Record Office there is an interesting aside: in 1876, the Norwich and Norfolk Provident Permanent Benefit Building Society turned out not to be so permanent and went into liquidation. Minns was allowed by the liquidator, Samuel Gulley, to redeem his mortgage for £20-8s-5d.

From 1851 to 1901 Minns described himself in public records with the plain English word ‘carver’: ‘carver in wood’, ‘wood carver’ and ‘wood and stone carver’. In 1881 there was a lapse when he used the Frenchified ‘sculptor’ but by 1891 and 1901 he was a ‘carver’ once more. This down-to-earth description of his profession was consistent with E.C. LeGrice’s description of a ‘shy and diffident woodcarver (who) had great difficulty in courteously excusing himself from being presented to his royal admirer, King Edward the Seventh’ [1].

Minn’s unflowing signature. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service [4]

James Minns was evidently no scholar, his only formal instruction being ‘a little general training which he received at the old (Norwich) School of Art when he was a youth’ [1]. An article in the Eastern Daily Press of 1904 confirmed, ‘He was no laborious school-product.’ [5]. It must have given him deep satisfaction, therefore, to have returned in his mid-sixties as Instructor in Wood Carving [6]. This was about 1890, at a time when the School of Art had rooms in the Free Library on St Andrew’s Street. In 1857 an extra storey had been added to accommodate the School: ‘On the third floor are two large rooms for the School of Art, with domed roofs and ample skylights, and four smaller apartments for classes are also provided [6].’

The Norwich Free Library at the junction of St Andrew’s Street and Duke Street. James Minns gave instruction on the third floor. (From ref [7])

This arrangement proved unsatisfactory, for a few decades later a student committee of six men and four women petitioned for a separate School of Art. One of the petitioners was J.W. Minns. This was James’ son John William who, like his father, became a Norwich Freeman in his twenties; he also described himself as ‘carver’ (1887) [8].

Despite his retiring nature James Minns was confident enough to instruct students in technical matters – after all, he had about 50 years of experience to pass on. He also had sufficient belief in the artistic merit of his work to submit – successfully – a carved panel to the Royal Academy’s 1897 Summer Exhibition.

11 Mariner’s Lane is suggested to have been his workshop [9]. (2017 is the catalogue number)

The Royal Academy has no photograph of this entry and for some time I had no idea of the delicacy of his work until I came across this example in LeGrice’s brief essay on Minns [1].

Could this be the same bullfinch panel listed in the Norfolk Museums Collections? There is no image of that panel on the site but Samantha Johns generously tracked it down and photographed it for me, revealing this to be quite a different bunch of bullfinches (for which the collective noun is, surprisingly, a ‘bellowing’).

Bullfinch Panel by James Minns. NWHCM 1897.55. Photo courtesy of Sam Johns.

In 1958 LeGrice [1] mentioned that several Minns panels were in the possession of the Colman family. Several still are and I was kindly shown the following three panels of intricate, deeply undercut birds and foliage (although the curved glass posed problems for this amateur photographer). Amongst them was the superb bullfinch panel featured in LeGrice’s article [1].

Birds nesting amongst the larch. The Bullfinch Panel. Courtesy of James Colman

Bird panel, courtesy of James Colman

Woodcock, courtesy of Matthew Colman

Norwich Castle Museum holds a further Minns bird carving under glass.

‘Pigeon’ by James Minns 1877. Norfolk Museums Service NWHCM: 1924.9

Minns’ success at the Royal Academy was not an isolated one for, as an obituary noted, ‘In competitions both at home and on the Continent he carried off some of the chief trophies of his time’ [5]. The carvings under glass quite likely represent his exhibition pieces. These high points of his artistic output contrasted with his bread-and-butter work at Gunton’s brickyard in Old Costessey. Over a long period – perhaps decades – he made moulds for decorative bricks that were turned out in their hundreds (see previous post on ‘Fancy Bricks’ [10]).

Cosseyware chimney bricks. The rose and shamrock are from the Patriotic range. Provided by Andy Maule.

However, one-off terracotta panels, like those at St Bennet’s – a private house in Cromer (1893) – gave Minns the opportunity to be more creative.

James Minns’ best known panels decorate the red brick building, part of Jarrold Department Store on London Street. Until 1946 this housed the offices of the architect, George Skipper. Although Skipper wasn’t supposed to advertise his architectural practice he installed a panel illustrating himself with three of his Norwich buildings in the background: The Daily Standard Office of 1899 in St Giles Street; The Norwich Union Building of 1904; and Commercial Chambers in Red Lion Street, 1901 [11].

In this tableau, a top-hatted Skipper points to a shield presented by a bearded workman in a dust coat, with younger carvers to the rear. The older man presenting the shield would have been the senior craftsman and, as such, is likely to be James Minns himself.

The head craftsman (left) and James Minns (see below)

Richard Barnes informs me that the terracotta panels on the front of Skipper’s office were being completed around the time (1904 [12]) that work was starting on another of Skipper’s projects – the building of Jarrold Department Store, literally next door. Because James Minns died in 1904, Richard wonders if much of the work might have been done by Minns’ son John. We cannot know for sure but it could explain the rare sighting of this shy carver.

As we saw in a previous post, father and son were both associated with the Costessey brickyard [10].

Workers at Gunton’s brickyard ca 1900 named by Peter Mann. James Minns (red dot) and John Minns (white dot) were labelled ‘Carvers of Norwich’, Photo courtesy of Paul Cooper

In his capacity as builder, George Gunton renovated the church at St Michael the Archangel, Booton, about six miles from Costessey. Minns carved the huge whirring wooden angels flying in the nave.

I haven’t been able to find objects sculpted by Minns in bronze although the St Michael over the door at Booton church is tentatively assigned to him on the racns website [11]. One specialist suggested that the sculptor was uncomfortable working with bronze [13] – perhaps someone like Minns, more used to subtractive carving than building up a maquette for casting? (See addendum at the end of this post).

Minns’ employment with Guntons was sufficiently accommodating that he could work on his own projects for local architects and designers in materials other than baked clay. For example, Minns worked with Thomas Jeckyll [14] on the Norfolk Gates – an exhibition piece by the Norwich foundry of Barnard Bishop and Barnards (1862) that was then given as a wedding gift by the people of Norfolk to the Prince (later, King Edward VII) and Princess of Wales at Sandringham [15]. Hand-wrought ironwork dominates but the piers and their base panels were cast and this is where Minns made his contribution, bringing him to the attention of the future king.

Left: The Norwich coat of arms, cast iron, from the Norfolk Gates. Image ©www.racns.co.uk. Right: carved wooden panel being sold by http://www.hillhouse-antiques.co.uk. A similar wood carving of the Norwich coat of arms, labelled “pattern for cast iron”, which is held in the Norfolk Museums Collections (NWHCM: 1969.59.1), is attributed to James Minns.

Over the years, Jeckyll worked extensively for the Boileau family at Ketteringham, including house, church, farmhouses and the estate in general. Minns is known to have carved the figures on the church tower [17] and he is likely to have provided other touches around the village.

About 1850, Jeckyll designed the well outside ‘Wellgate’ in Low Street, Ketteringham; it bears the Boileau arms.

James Minns also designed this logo for Colman’s mustard. Colmans Duo.001.jpeg

The bull’s head, from LeGrice’s article on Minns [1]. ©E.C.LeGrice

He also did much of the carving in the Colman’s home at Carrow House. Helen C. Colman reminisced:

“My Father and Mother returned to Carrow House on June 7th 1861 though it was still more or less in the hands of workmen … but the wood carving in oak in the Library … was for the most part done during the ‘sixties … it was nearly all carved locally, and much of it by James Minns.” [16].

Dated 1862, the fireplace in the Old Library at Carrow House is richly carved with birds, flowers and foliage. The four human heads, however, were said by Helen Colman to be ‘carved by someone from a distance’ [16]); i.e., not Minns.

Mantelpiece in the Old Library at Carrow House carved by James Minns, except the four small heads. Photos courtesy of Sam Johns, Norfolk Museums Service

The remodelling of Carrow House is thought to have been carried out by Edward Boardman [17] (whose son was to marry into the Colman family) and he would have been familiar with James Minns. Indeed, a footnote on Boardman’s plans for the 1891 renovation of the Manor House at Catton specifically names the Minns family of carvers [18, 19].

The cat and tun (barrel) rebus, carved by the Minns family, on the south door at Catton Manor House, copies the older carving on the east side. Courtesy of Robert Radford. Photo: Ray Jones, Old Catton Society

Although the Colman family were Nonconformist they supported church-going amongst their workers; at St Andrew’s Trowse – a short walk from Colman’s Carrow Works – they donated a reredos of the Last Supper. It is said to be ‘a copy of an Italian masterpiece, carved by James Minns of Lakenham’ and was dedicated in 1905, a year after Minns died [20].

The Last Supper is often depicted with all figures aligned on the far side of the table, school-photograph style. Here, a second row of figures at front increases the depth. I can only find similar versions in Northern European panels. Can you identify the original?

George Skipper’s masterwork was Surrey House, headquarters of Norwich Union (now Aviva) in Surrey Street, and was completed in 1904. A 2008 conservation plan for Aviva states that H.H. Martyn & Co of Cheltenham, who specialised in woodwork and panelling, were assisted by James Minns of 11 Arthur Street, Norwich, “including the carved figures over the main doorway” [21]. The use of Minns’ correct address lends credibility although large carvings of women lolling on the pediment aren’t the usual Minns territory.

More in keeping with the skilfully carved foliage we saw in his bird panels are the baroque swags of fruit and flowers hanging on the mahogany panelling. These are reminiscent of Grinling Gibbons’ work and Le Grice did, after all, confer the title of ‘Norfolk’s Grinling Gibbons’ on Minns. On the other hand, reproductions of Grinling Gibbons carvings were a speciality of Martyn’s of Cheltenham [22] so we await corroboration that James Minns was the actual carver.

Left: Intricate carving from the boardroom, Surrey House. Right: Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) Hampton Court Palace (by Camster2, Wikipedia, Creative Commons licence).

James Minns died on the 6th of August 1904. His death certificate gives the cause of death as cardiac syncope; he also had senile decay, which makes one wonder if this affected the quality of his work in the latter years and whether his son had to do work on his behalf. James Benjamin Shingles Minns left £200 to his son John plus ‘effects’ – perhaps his tools. A few days later, the Eastern Daily Press wrote this tribute: “There passed away this week in Norwich a brilliant practitioner of a delightful form of art. As a wood carver Mr Minns was in the utmost sense of that term a genius [5].”

If you know anything about the life and works of James Minns, especially previously unrecorded carvings, please get in touch via the Contact link. Comments will not be published without your approval.

Sources

E.C.LeGrice (1958). James Minns: Norfolk’s Grinling Gibbons. East Anglian Magazine vol 18, No2, December.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2019/08/15/going-dutch-the-norwich-strangers/
http://www.norfolkpubs.co.uk/norwich/snorwich/nchsp4.htm
Norfolk Record Office: N/TC/D1/100/5-12
Under ‘Local Topics’, an article written in the week of Minn’s death. Eastern Daily Press 12th August 1904.
Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton with John Steven (1982). ‘A Happy Eye’: A School of Art in Norwich 1845-1982. Pub: Jarrold & Sons Ltd, Norwich.
George A. Stephen (1917). Three Centuries of a City Library. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19804/19804-h/19804-h.htm
http://nfro.norwichfreemen.org.uk/detail/11785/
https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=ann_1283258555
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/05/fancy-bricks/
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp
David Bussey and Eleanor Martin (2012).The Architects of Norwich: George John Skipper, 1856-1948. Norwich Society publication.
http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=1065
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/04/15/thomas-jeckyll-the-boileau-family/
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=540
Helen C. Colman (1922) “Carrow House Past and Present”. In, Carrow Works Magazine pp51-54.
Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
Ray Jones of the Old Catton Society, personal communication.
https://norfolktalesmyths.com/2020/02/11/adventures-of-the-old-catton-village-sign
https://www.trowsechurch.co.uk/page/43/about-our-church-2
2008 Aviva Conservation Management Plan mentions ‘H.H. Martyn & Co. Ltd., of Cheltenham – specialist woodwork and panelling, assisted by James Minns of 11 Arthur Street, Norwich (boardroom and committee rooms woodwork including the carved figures over the main doorway)’. Courtesy of Aviva Archivist Thomas Barnes.
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/H._H._Martyn

Thanks. I am grateful to: Peter Mann, Paul Cooper and Brian Gage who provided information on the Costessey brickyard; Richard Barnes for information on Jeckyll; Thomas Barnes, Archivist at Aviva for access and information; Robert Radford, owner of Catton Old Hall and Ray Jones of the Old Catton Society; Sue Roe for genealogy; Hill House Antiques & Decorative Arts Ltd; Byron Cooke and Mary Perrott for access to Carrow House; Samantha Johns of Norfolk Museums Service, for photographing Minns’ work; and Matthew Colman and James Colman for allowing me to photograph three superb examples of Minns’ framed bird carvings. Evelyn Simak provided James Minns’ death certificate.

Addendum 30/11/2020

Recently revisiting the carving of the Prince of Wales feathers on the Agricultural Hall I had the impression that I’d seen this way of handling feathers before. Comparison of the brick feathers with the wings on the Booton bronze shows they share stylistic traits: a rather fluffy treatment of the top of the feather and wing compared to the transverse barbs below. They could well be by the same carver/sculptor.

Faces

13 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

George Skipper, norwich cathedral, Norwich City Hall, Public art, roof bosses, Stained Glass

The face is the most important part of one’s identity. It conveys a visible expression of personality and can used in art to evoke a range of emotions. But at a time when faces were not universally recognised other symbols could be used to underline identity.

“The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” (Cicero)

I was reminded of this by the painted rood screen from St Mary’s North Elmham. Despite having their faces scratched in the reign (probably) of Edward VI the rather mournful saints, Barbara, Cecilia and Dorothy (Babs, Cissy and Dot) can still be recognised to be portraits of the same woman. But likeness to long-departed saints is hardly the point here; instead, beauteous Barbara is identified by the tower in which she was hidden from the world, Cecilia’s virginity is signified by her wreath of lilies, and Dorothy (patron of gardeners, amongst others) holds a bunch of flowers. The face is incidental to the virtue signified.

Rood screen, St Mary’s North Elmham, Norfolk (ca 1474) saved from destruction by being used as floorboards. SS Barbara, Cecilia and Dorothy

In the late medieval period Norwich was a major centre for glass painting and the often stereotypical faces of saints and angel can be recognised throughout East Anglia [2, 3]. The same faces appear in various guises suggesting they were drawn from the same cartoon. For example, the angel from the Toppes-sponsored windows in St Peter Mancroft can be overlaid pretty faithfully upon the saint from the ‘Toppes’ window in Norwich Guildhall. Both were painted ca 1450 by the workshop of John Wighton, in which his wife and son also worked [4].

Left, St Peter Mancroft; right, Guildhall; centre, overlay

A wonderful sequence of images from the late C15 is to be found in the chantry chapel of St Helen’s in the Great Hospital, Norwich. These roof bosses may have escaped desecration because Henry VIII’s zealously Protestant and iconoclastic son, Edward VI, handed over control of the chapel to the mayor, sheriff and citizens of Norwich [1].

Two faces are reputed to be of Queen Anne of Bohemia and her husband King Richard II, but the evidence is slender. The woman does wear a hard-to-see crown: the man does not, but then he was usurped [1].

Reputedly, Queen Anne of Bohemia and King Richard II

Queen Anne and her husband visited Norwich in 1383 but by the time Bishop Goldwell (rebus, a golden well) …

… had this vaulted ceiling built (ca 1472-1499) the couple had been dead a century. In the glorious Wilton Diptych, Richard II kneels clean-shaven before the Virgin. So if the boss of the hirsute man is meant to represent Richard then it may not be a likeness but a representation of deposed majesty, wearing a headband instead of a crown.

The Wilton Diptych 1395-9. National Gallery

Norwich Cathedral has over 1000 bosses carved into the keystones of its roof vaults – more than any other religious building in the world. In the cloisters are several of the Green Man – a pagan figure representing, perhaps, the rebirth of nature. However … just as the term ‘ploughman’s lunch’ seems to have been a fiction concocted by The Cheese Bureau (surely a Philadelphia soul group?) as recently as the 1950s, so – it is claimed – the term ‘Green Man’ as applied to church roof bosses can only be traced back to an article by Lady Raglan in 1939 [quoted in 5]. Can this be right? Anyway, the faces can be classified as: a ‘leaf mask’ made from a single leaf; a ‘foliate face’ made from several leaves; ‘disgorgers’, with leaves or vines exiting mouth, ears, nose; this one seems to be a ‘peeper’ or ‘watcher’.

A face peeps out behind the leaves in the cloisters of Norwich Cathedral (1316-19)

Roof bosses also decorate the vaulting inside St Ethelbert’s Gate to the Cathedral. The present gate was built ca 1316 (restored in 1815 and 1964), incorporating the remains of the Norman gate burnt in the riots of 1272 [6]. The conflict centred on a jousting target (quintain) in Tombland at which two priory men were detained. The prior replied by bringing in armed men from Yarmouth who went on the rampage; the citizens, in turn, attacked the priory, set fire to St Ethelbert’s Gate and parts of the cathedral itself were set ablaze. Thirteen of the prior’s men were killed but King Henry III, who came from Bury St Edmunds to restore order, put 35 citizens to death: by dragging some behind a cart; by hanging, drawing and quartering others; and by burning alive a woman who set fire to the gate. To compensate the priory the citizens were required to fund the rebuilding of the gate. The naturalistic head on the boss looks down with distaste.

The Despenser Retable survived the Reformation by being inverted as a table top. Now, this altarpiece can be seen in St Luke’s Chapel in Norwich Cathedral. One intriguing hypothesis is that this late medieval treasure was commissioned by Henry le Despenser, the ‘Fighting Bishop’ (1370-1406), to mark the suppression of the Peasant’s Revolt by Richard II and perhaps his own part in the East Anglian skirmishes [7]. Incidentally, the rich red colour in the painting was known as ‘Norwich Red’ and was later used in the city’s famous C18 shawls [7].

The Despenser Retable, Norwich Cathedral

The first panel depicts the Scourging of Jesus. Pilate’s representative handles Jesus’ hair while the face of the man holding the scourge is “contorted with the effort” [7] of delivering the punishment (out of shot, both his feet spring off the ground).

On Agricultural Hall Plain, between the Hall (‘Anglia TV’) and Shirehall, is George Wade’s memorial. Unveiled in 1904, ‘Peace’ records the 300 Norfolk men who served in the Boer War. The mood, subdued rather than victorious, is conveyed by the angel’s neutral expression as she sheathes her sword [8].

‘Peace’, George Wade’s Boer War memorial on Agricultural Hall Plain (1904)

In St Martin-at-Palace Plain, next to the Wig and Pen pub, is Cotman House. One of the city’s favourite sons, the painter John Sell Cotman, lived here from 1823 to 1834. If he had been born in London rather than the provinces an artist of Cotman’s stature would surely have been commemorated in Westminster Abbey.

JS Cotman by Hubert Miller 1914 [8]

Cotman House, where John Sell Cotman opened his ‘School for Drawing and Painting in Water-colours’ [9]

Magdalen Street and nearby Colegate have a good number of late medieval and Georgian doorways [see 10, 11]. Pevsner and Wilson judged No. 44 to be the climax of Magdalen Street, with “one of the most ornate Georgian façades in Norwich.” [12]. George Plunkett wondered if the doorway might have been constructed to designs by Thomas Ivory, architect of The Assembly Rooms and the Octagon Chapel [13]. The keystone on the arch is decorated with a classically-influenced head.

The closed eyes of the head suggest a death mask: the ostrich feathers in the figure’s hair signify a woman of fashion [14].

At the beginning of the C20, Norwich architect George Skipper played with a variety of influences, including Art Nouveau [15], but for the city’s banks and insurance companies he used a Neo-Classical Palladian style, adding seriousness with borrowed classical motifs. Above the door of the London and Provincial Bank in London Street (now The Ivy) is a female head [8]. The mild erosion makes it difficult to confirm whether she wears a garland, synonymous with Flora the Roman goddess of flowers and Spring. However, the swags of fruit at the putti’s feet convey the required air of prosperity.

The same year (1906), Skipper commissioned similar stone sculpture for the Norwich and London Accident Assurance in St Giles Street (currently St Giles Hotel). Once more, a sense of prosperity is conveyed by the swags of fruit and flowers.

Although the androgynous head bears a laurel wreath, rather than flowers, the festoons of fruit and flowers again are indicative of Flora.For the later (1928-30) Lloyds Bank on Gentleman’s Walk by HM Cautley, a similar head was used, decorated with a mini-swag of finely carved flowers. Richard Cocke suggests this is a direct tribute to Skipper’s London and Provincial Bank around the corner [8].

Nearby, on Red Lion Street is another Skipper building, Commercial Chambers built in 1903 [15]. The facade is almost riotously decorated in buff terracotta (probably Doulton). The first floor cornice is supported by two boys and a girl, almost certainly sculpted from life, making a change from the usual putti.

Fig Trio.jpg

Crowning the building is a cowled figure making entries into a ledger with a quill. This might reasonably be thought to represent the owner, the accountant Charles Larking; but as we saw previously it is clearly modelled on the architect himself [15].

At about the time that Skipper was designing these buildings, his pupil J. Owen Bond – who was responsible for some of the few Modernist buildings in the city – designed the Burlington Buildings in Orford Place (1904). Instead of female heads, the building was decorated with three pairs of full-length, reclining women: one of each pair reading a book, the other holding a cornucopia.

‘Burlington Buildings’ was built for offices rather than for a bank or insurance company. Unfortunately, this fine Renaissance-style building is hard to appreciate, being rather hemmed in at the back of Debenhams.

The Horn of Plenty is not especially associated with Flora and could just as well refer to Concordia (goddess of Peace and Harmony), Abundantia (Abundance personified) and Fortuna (Luck and Fortune). In architecture it seems that the symbolism of plenty may be more important than adherence to any particular goddess.

This can be seen on the bases that James Woodford sculpted for the flagpoles in the memorial gardens outside the City Hall [16]. Each base shows an Assyrian-influenced priestess holding an overflowing basket. Woodford’s references to the two-dimensional paintings and reliefs from the Assyrian and Ancient Egyptian empires are entirely fitting outside a City Hall that shunned Gothic and Classical motifs in favour of Modernism. As in Egyptian art, the figure presents a combination of frontal and profile views. With the head in profile it is difficult to express emotion; it is the associated animals and plants that bear the symbolic load, celebrating the region’s agricultural abundance.

A celebration of Agriculture by James Woodford (1938), who also sculpted the 18 roundels celebrating Industry on the City Hall’s bronze doors [8].

cheeky face.jpg

Sources

Rose, Martial. (2006). A Crowning Glory: the vaulted bosses in the chantry of St Helen’s, the Great Hospital, Norwich. Pub: Lark’s Press, Dereham.
Woodforde, C. (1950) The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century. Pub, Oxford University Press
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2015/12/19/norfolks-stained-glass-angels/
King, D. J. (2006) The Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, CVMA (GB), V, Oxford.
https://thecompanyofthegreenman.wordpress.com
Meeres, Frank (2011). The Story of Norwich. Pub: Phillimore and Co Ltd. (A highly readable account of the city’s history).
McFadyen, Phillip (2015). Norwich Cathedral Despenser Retable. Pub: Medieval Media, Cromer.
Cocke, Richard (with photography by Sarah Cocke) (2013). Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk. Pub; Liverpool University Press. (An essential source for anyone interested in East Anglian sculpture).
Kent, Arnold and Stephenson, Andrew (1949). Norwich Inheritance. Pub: Jarrold and Sons Ltd
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/06/16/entrances-and-exits-doors-ii/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/26/early-doors-tudor-to-georgian/
Pevsner, Nikloaus and Wilson, Bill (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I, Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/mag.htm
https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/regency-fashion-how-a-lady-accommodated-her-head-feathers-at-the-end-of-the-18th-century/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1208277486

Thanks. Chris Walton writes the very informative Company of the Green Man website [5] and I am grateful to him for information on foliate faces. I thank Revd Dr Peter Doll, Canon Librarian of Norwich Cathedral for permission to photograph the Despenser Retable and Dr Roland Harris, Cathedral Archaeologist for information on the cathedral bosses and the Ethelbert Gate.

Bonus track

Nelson with his favourite alpenhorn

Unfortunately, the surface on this statue of Admiral Lord Nelson by Thomas Milnes (1852) – which is situated in the Upper Cathedral Close – is now quite worn and has lost much of its detail [8]. This, combined with its north-facing aspect, doesn’t favour photography but I couldn’t omit Norfolk’s most famous son, albeit ‘below the line’.

The flamboyant Mr Skipper

15 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Art Nouveau, Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Cosseyware, George Skipper, Hotel de Paris Cromer, James Minns, Jarrolds Norwich, Poppyland

Two architects changed the face of Victorian Norwich: Edward Boardman and George Skipper. Boardman sketched out the quiet fabric of a post-medieval city but it was Skipper who provided the firecrackers.

The son of a Dereham builder, Skipper (1856-1948), spent a year at Norwich School of Art studying art and – probably at his father’s insistence – architecture [1]. He did, of course, follow the architectural path but – as the Norwich Mercury wrote in 1906 – he was known for his ‘artistic temperament’ and he expressed this side of his personality in the exuberance of his buildings. He is reputed to have said, you “need an artist for a first rate building” [1a]. However, one of his early buildings (1890), for which he and his brother Frederick won the commission, was the “modestly ‘Queen Anne’ town hall” of Cromer [2] that gave little idea of the fireworks to come.

CromerTown Hall.JPG This project is important, though, for introducing the association between Skipper and the ‘carver’ James Minns, who was responsible for the decorative brickwork from Gunton Bros’ Brickyard at Costessey [3].

In addition to the decorative shields, James Minns sculpted the tableau in the pediment depicting the discovery of Iceland by local sailor Robert Bacon [4]

In the late 1880s Clement Scott’s column ‘Poppyland‘ in the Daily Telegraph extolled the virtues of the North Norfolk coast, particularly around Overstrand [5,6]. The book based on these articles, The Poppyland Papers, proved very popular and this, combined with the arrival of the Great Eastern Railway in 1887, transformed nearby Cromer from a quiet fishing village to a fashionable watering place for the wealthy.

Not everyone succumbed to the bracing pleasures of Cromer, including the young and homesick Winston Churchill who wrote to his mother: “I am not enjoying myself very much”.

The comfortable middle and upper middle classes came to see the coastal attractions and they needed suitable accommodation [5]. This triggered a wave of hotel building and Skipper was engaged by a consortium of Norwich businessmen to design several of them [6]. After The Grand Hotel he built The Metropole, which is said to have shown signs of Skipper’s flair and exuberance [1] but both hotels were demolished.

The last vestige of the Hotel Metropole

A survivor was Skipper’s best known project, the Hotel de Paris (1896). Its frontage, which borrows features from the late medieval palace at Chambord, disguised the previous Regency buildings. Marc Girouard thought the result was cruder but jollier than Skipper’s other hotels [2].

The hotel demonstrates one of Skipper’s favourite tropes of using turrets and cupolas to provide interest at the skyline [6]. He used the same device to disguise an ugly lift heading at Sandringham [7].

Sandringham House. Skipper’s is the taller of the two cupolas. http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/sandringham

Further along the clifftop at Cromer is another of Skipper’s hotels – The Cliftonville – with decorative ‘Cosseyware’ (fancy brickware) by Guntons of Costessey near Norwich [8]. Skipper was responsible for modifying the hotel originally designed by another Norwich architect, AF Scott [6]. The Cliftonville was transformed into an example of the Arts and Crafts style showing the influence of the French Renaissance as well as the C19th Queen Anne Revival.

Trevor Page & Co of Norwich provided the soft furnishings [6]. The company was a partnership between Henry Trevor (who made great use of Cosseyware seconds in creating the Plantation Garden in Norwich) and his stepson John Page. Much of the ‘hard’ interior decoration survives.

Clockwise from top left: Turret with octagonal cupola; stained glass peacock panel; Guntons terracotta panel; dining room doors referencing ‘Poppyland’; fireplace in the dining room.

Skipper designed several private houses in Cromer. St Bennet’s at 37 Vicarage Road, built in 1893, is one of the most impressive. Freely decorated in red brick panels it is said to have been carved by James Minns [6].

St Bennets, Cromer, designed by Skipper 1893; brick carving attributed to Minns

Skipper’s first offices (1880) in Norwich were in Opie Street but by 1891 he was employing about 50 people and in 1896 he moved to 7 London Street. At that time, architects were not allowed to advertise their services but, flying close to the regulatory wind, he commissioned Guntons to sculpt terracotta plaques depicting Skipper, on site, examining the work of sculptors and as the architect discussing plans with a client.

Carved brick tableaux at No 7 London Street. Upper centre: Skipper, with family to the left, inspecting sculpted work. Lower centre: Skipper showing work to clients.

I suspect the figure presenting Skipper the plaque in the upper panel could be James Minns himself – the ‘carver’ for Guntons. Although about 68 at the time Minns was still sculpting to a high standard for one year later he successfully submitted a carved wooden panel to the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy [9].

Minns Duo.jpg

Skipper’s designs draw on a variety of sources. The French Renaissance style of his early years (enriched by Flemish influences from his visit to Belgium as a student) were to give way to the more weighty Neo-Classical Palladian buildings – buildings such as the Norfolk and Norwich Savings Bank (now Barclays Bank) in Red Lion St, the Norwich and London Accident Assurance Association (now the St Giles House Hotel in St Giles’ St) and his most expensive and sumptuous project, Surrey House for Norwich Union Life Insurance Society. But around the turn of the century he still found time for more playful ventures, embarking on ‘the mildest flirtation with British Art Nouveau'[7]. The Royal Arcade – covered in a previous blog [10] – is one such ‘transitional adventure’ although the credit for this Art Nouveau gem must surely go to the head of Doulton Pottery’s Architectural Department,WJ Neatby, who designed the jewel-like surfaces.

In a post on decorative tiles [11], I noted the close similarity between Neatby’s design for the young woman holding a disc in the spandrels of the arcade’s central crossing and a self-portrait by the Brooklyn photographer Zaida Ben-Yusuf. But, drawing various threads together, it seems likely that both artists were borrowing from the work of Alphonse Mucha whose well-known posters illustrate young women holding very similar poses [see 10 for a fuller discussion].

Left: Zodiac figure by WJ Neatby (1899); right ‘The Odor of Pomegranates’ (ca 1899) by Zaida Ben-Yusuf

Hints of Art Nouveau were also to be seen in the turrets and domes of the Norfolk Daily Standard offices (1899-1900) on St Giles Street. This riotously decorated building survived the bombing of the adjacent building in the Blitz (1942) but later lost some of its features during a conversion to a Wimpy Bar.

Art nouveau touches can be seen on the spandrels above the first floor windows and on the Dutch/Flemish gables. The copper-domed turret is a familiar Skipper motif.

It was to ‘exuberant’ buildings such as these that Poet Laureate John Betjeman was referring when he made his well-known quotation comparing Skipper to Antonio Gaudi of Barcelona [7, 12].

Frontispiece to the catalogue of the Norwich School of Art’s exhibition on Skipper, 1975 [12]

A more convincing Art Nouveau building is the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club at Lowestoft. Skipper’s competition-winning design from 1902 is stripped of the decoration and frenetic eclecticism of his other projects to produce a building using “the vocabulary of British Art Nouveau … with more than a sidelong look at CFA Voysey” [7]. The plain stucco walls – one of Voysey’s signatures – and sloped buttresses are relieved by circular and semi-circular windows and topped by a copper dome. This puritanical excursion was a one-off for Skipper.

broadlandmemories.co.uk

Back in Norwich Skipper designed Commercial Chambers in Red Lion Street (1901-3), wedged into a narrow site between another of his projects (the Norfolk and Norwich Savings Bank 1900-3) and John Pollock’s veterinary premises designed by his great competitor, Edward Boardman (1901-2). Even on a such a narrow building Skipper manages to create interest at the skyline by using moulded cornice, statuary, a finial and a campanile that just sneaks above Boardman’s adjacent Dutch gable by the height of its copper dome.

Left, Boardman’s building for Pollock; centre, Skipper’s Commercial Chambers; right, Skipper’s Norfolk and Norwich Savings Bank.

Because Commercial Chambers was built for the accountant Charles Larking [7] you would be forgiven for thinking that the robed figure at the top of the building, making entries into a ledger, was Larking himself but it is clearly the self-publicist Skipper.

skipper montage.jpg

Between 1896 and 1925 [6] Skipper remodelled, in stages, the frontage of his neighbour’s department store on London and Exchange Streets. Original plans show that Skipper had also planned a dome to surmount the semi-circular bay – “rather like a tiered wedding cake” [1] – at the corner of Jarrolds department store. But at the end of this long project no copper-clad dome materialised [1].

Work began first on the London Street side whose second floor facade is punctuated by a series of Royal Doulton plaques bearing the names of authors first published by Jarrold Printing [7]. The one shown below commemorates Anna Sewell who wrote Black Beauty while she lived in Old Catton just outside Norwich.

On another project, Skipper’s plans for a dome were again frustrated. In 1907 Skipper completed the London and Provincial Bank (now GAP {and now The Ivy brasserie, 2018}) a little further along London Street. Architectural interest was created by breaking the flat symmetry of the classical facade with a fourth bay containing a curved two-storey bay window [7]: the deeply recessed cylinder even broaches the massive cornice that caps the building. This is explained by the fact that Skipper originally planned to top the fourth bay with a trademark cupola whose circular section would have echoed the curved segment of the cornice. In the event, the cupola was abandoned because it would have infringed a neighbouring property’s ‘right of light’ [7].

Just before the First World War, Skipper had planned to retire but the loss of his savings in the East Kent Coal Board meant he had to keep working. After the war his work in Norwich seems largely confined to humble plans for roads and sewerage required to open up that part of the Golden Triangle around Heigham Park and College Road (he also designed neo-Georgian buildings in that road) [13]. Further afield, he designed various buildings in Norfolk, Kent and London and in 1926 built a second extension to the University Arms Hotel in Cambridge. Here – perhaps harking back to his heyday – he did successfully add two cupolas: it was, “an unmistakable Skipper gesture, but in this case somewhat incongruous” [7].

University Arms Hotel as proposed after the fire in 2013. Painting by Chris Draper. johnsimpsonarchitects.com

During the Second World War Skipper had kept his London Street offices open while his son Edward, a fellow architect, was on active service [7]. Edward could not, however, afford to keep the offices open and in 1946 sold the building to Jarrolds. Skipper died in 1948 when he was nearly 92.

skipper cupolas2.jpg

Sources

Summers, David (2009). George Skipper: Norfolk Architect. In, Powerhouses of provincial architecture 1837-1914 (Ed, Kathryn Ferry). Chapter 6 pp 75-83. Pub: The Victorian Society. Ref1a http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/whos-who/george-skipper.htm
Girouard, Marc (1977). Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement 1860-1900. Pub: Yale University Press.
James Minns, Carver of Norwich. http://www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk/copy-of-norwich-history. Mentioned also in previous blog [9]:
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=1132
http://jermy.org/poppy02.html
Hitchings, Glenys and Branford, Christopher (2015). ‘George John Skipper, The Man Who Created Cromer’s Skyline’. Pub: Iceni Print and Products. Available from Jarrolds and from City Bookshop, Norwich.
Jolly, David and Skipper, Edward (1980). Celebrating Skipper 100: 1880-1980. Booklet produced by Edward Skipper and Associates; foreword by Edward Skipper with posthumous contribution from David Jolly [see 11]. Available at Norwich Library Heritage Centre, Cat No. C720.9 [OS].
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/05/fancy-bricks/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/08/18/angels-in-tights/
http://wp.me/p71GjT-1C1
Jolly, David (1975). Architect Exuberant: George Skipper 1856-1948. Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at The Norwich School of Art, Norwich, 24th Nov.-13th Dec., 1975
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/09/29/decorative-tiles/
Clive Lloyd (2017). Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle. Pub: Clive Lloyd. ISBN 978-1-5272-1576-4 (Available from Jarrolds, Norwich and City Bookshop, Norwich).

Decorative tiles

29 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Norwich history

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alphonse Mucha, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Doulton tiles, George Skipper, Norwich architecture, William de Morgan

There are so few art nouveau buildings in this country but many homes around 1900 would have possessed beautiful examples of the art in the form of ceramic tiles. I used to collect them. They were used as inserts in fireplaces, as splash backs on washstands, panels in doorways and even as teapot stands. Tiles provided a relatively cheap and easy access to designers of the day such as William Morris, Walter Crane, Leon Solon and William de Morgan. The fourth tile below is a favourite, designed by Lewis F Day, a prominent member of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Tiles 1 and 3 are by JH Barratt (1904); tiles 2 and 4 are by Pilkington’s (ca 1895) and designed by Lewis Foreman Day – the fourth bearing his raised initials.

Similar tiles can be seen as decorative panels in porches around the Golden Triangle. Whitehall Road and Kingsley Road have good examples.

New2porches.001.jpeg

The Norwich foundry of Barnard Bishop and Barnards was internationally recognised for its Aesthetic Movement fireplaces for which Thomas Jeckyll had designed the japonaise motifs cast into the surface of their products. But by the time Jeckyll died in 1881 fashions had moved on and tiled inserts had become a major decorative element.

A selection of tiles offered by Barnard Bishop and Barnards at their London showroom, 1884. Courtesy, Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell.

William de Morgan designed his most popular tile for Barnard Bishop and Barnards’ Norwich Ironworks. The fanned carnation is known as the BBB design in recognition of the fact that Barnards had given him his first large order for tiles to be placed in their cast-iron fireplaces [1].

Wm de Morgan’s ‘BBB’ tiles (left) and one of his designs (right). In production from 1898. (c) Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Great Yarmouth’s wonderful Hippodrome (1903) displayed these Art Nouveau letter tiles [9].

Yarmouth Hippodrome2.jpg

Similar tiles can be found in Norwich’s Haymarket Chambers, built by George Skipper (1901-2); these are incorporated into the facade above the narrow entrance to the Lamb Inn, situated in the courtyard behind.

It is not known who made the tiles but a few years earlier Skipper commissioned Doulton’s WJ Neatby – of Harrod’s Food Hall fame – to produce these art nouveau tiles for The Royal Arcade (see previous article).

Neatby decorated the spandrels of the central crossing of the arcade with tiles depicting a young woman who, in preliminary drawings, was intended to be holding a sign of the zodiac. In Brooklyn, at about the same time as the arcade was built (1899), Zaida Ben-Yusuf produced what appears to be a self-portrait of a woman contemplating a pomegranate. The similarities are striking.

Left: Zodiac figure by WJ Neatby (1899); right: ‘The Odor of Pomegranates’ 1899 by Zaida Ben-Yusuf (ca 1899).

But recently, I saw this pressed leather panel decorating a cupboard in a junk shop. The figure is based on the 1896 Zodiac poster by Alphonse Mucha, surely the original inspiration for the models above?

The 2016 exhibition at Tate Britain, ‘Painting with Light’ [3] examined the cross-referencing between early photographs and painting. In it, Ben-Yusuf’s photograph was compared with Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s painting of ‘Proserpine’, Empress of Hades(1874). Jupiter agreed to release Proserpine back to Earth provided she hadn’t tasted Hades’ fruit: but she had eaten a single seed. As the exhibition notes suggest, Rosetti may have been examining his feelings for his muse Jane, the wife of his friend William Morris, the model for his painting and his soon-to-be lover.

Proserpine 1874 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05064. Creative Commons

Patterns on tiles can be made in several ways. Raised outlines can be impressed on the blank during manufacture but tube-lining depends on the direct hand of the artist. For this, semi-liquid clay is squeezed through a nozzle onto a blank tile to form a raised outline and the areas between are then painted with coloured glazes before firing.

Cabinet by Shapland and Petter of Barnstaple with tube-lined tile containing a Dutch scene; such scenes were popular ca 1900-1910.

The Norwich Heritage Open Days 2016 gave access to two tiled fireplaces not normally seen by the public. The first is in Carrow Abbey. The C12th abbey was founded as a Benedictine nunnery and was considerably renovated (1899-1909) for mustard magnate J J Colman by Edward Boardman Jr, who had married into the Colman family.

Carrow Priory Prioress' parlour [3416] 1940-05-16.jpg

Carrow Abbey, prioress’ parlour (1940). Courtesy www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

This neo-Gothic fireplace has been decorated with beautiful, large, raised tiles in the Iznik style that had such an influential effect on William de Morgan during his ‘Persian’ phase. However, these tiles are not flat but embossed and there is nothing to indicate that de Morgan produced such moulded tiles.

Fireplace, Carrow Abbey. Courtesy Andy Maule.

A prolonged trawl through the internet produced a tile in the identical pattern and colourway [4]. The labels says it is a Qajar Iznik-style tile, origin Iran, ca C19th. So, not by de Morgan but direct from his source of inspiration.

The second ‘Heritage Day’ fireplace is in Curat’s House (for online tour see [5]). The house at numbers 3-4 Haymarket – once Back’s pub and wine bar, now Fatface – is a well-preserved timber-framed medieval building secreted behind a later facade.

The late C15th-early C16th house was home to John Curat, mercer. Curat’s House was built on the site of an earlier house with a vaulted crypt that had been part of the Old Jewry – the Jewish quarter since the arrival of the Normans [6]. The overhanging jetties of the timber building are now disguised at ground floor level by the C20th shopfront and the upper floors by Georgian brickwork.

Curats House Norwich.jpg

The Delft tiles in the first floor fireplace are described as ‘original’ but tin-glazed blue and white tiles have been made ever since the C16th, first in The Netherlands then in England. Delftware can be difficult to date with accuracy, as the tile below demonstrates…

‘Gilbert and George’ tile made in Spitalfields 1985 by Simon Pettet [7].

Another hidden gem: to the side of the covered courtyard in the ancient Maid’s Head Hotel in Tombland is a small, panelled Jacobean bar. It was supposed to have been the innkeeper’s snug and contains this lovely Dutch-tiled fireplace.

Maids Head.jpg

In contrast to ceramic tiles, where the decoration is painted as a surface glaze, encaustic tiles were made by pressing a pattern into wet clay then filling the impression with different-coloured liquid clays, or by compressing clay dusts under high pressure. Encaustic tiles had been around since the medieval period but their popularity peaked in the second half of the C19th, during the Gothic Revival. A fine example can be seen at the chapel of the former Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, designed by Thomas Henry Wyatt and Edward Boardman in 1879-84.

NN chapel.jpg

Two identical marble tile mosaics, one in the Guildhall (left) and the other in the Norwich Technical Institute (later the School of Art, now Norwich University of the Arts, right), are thought to have been made around 1900 by craftsmen from the Italian community living in Ber Street. The two City Arms are identical but the backgrounds are different. The 28 bees could reasonably represent the busy students of the Technical Institute but what was meant by the 22 shrimp-like motifs in the Guildhall (Anyone? Amanda Donnelly suggested silkworms).

Mosaic .jpg

About a decade later (1912), the School of Art at Great Yarmouth was designed by JW ‘Concrete’ Cockrill. Just before the restoration of this proto-modernist building in 2010 this fine tiled facade had been obliterated with white paint [8]. In contrast to the Art Nouveau curlicues on the Yarmouth Hippodrome [9], built by his son RS Cockrill in 1903, these tiles form an austerely geometric pattern reminiscent of the Viennese Secession.

Thanks to: Hannah Henderson (Museum of Norwich at The Bridewell), Andy Maule (for the Carrow Abbey photo) and Michelle Ivimey and Steve Ryan (of RMG Ltd, for access to the old N&N chapel).

The Norwich Society helps people enjoy and appreciate the history and character of Norwich. Visit: www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk

Sources

Norwich’s pre-loved buildings

28 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Decorative Arts, Norwich buildings

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Edward Boardman, George Skipper, Norwich architecture, Norwich shoe industry, Norwich textile industry, Norwich University of the Arts, Norwich weaving

Who, at this Victorian horse market outside Norwich Castle, would have predicted that motor vehicles would displace horses from the city’s streets or that a shopping mall with space for over 1000 cars would be excavated where they once stood? This post is about once-vibrant buildings, such as stables, corn halls, weaving sheds and leather boot and shoe manufactories, that outlived their original purpose and had to be reinvented in order to survive.

Norwich horse market on site of former cattle market ca 1900. (c) Norfolk County Council

It is still possible to catch glimpses of life in the horse-drawn era.The words above this arch (shoeing, forge, livery, stable) in Orford Yard off Red Lion Street are a reminder of John Pollock’s veterinary surgery and livery stables. The date on the building’s Dutch gable gives the date of this Edward Boardman building as 1902. Boardman turns out to be a major figure in this post. Looses Norwich.jpg The yard now accommodates Loose’s Cookshop and Chez Denis cafe and brasserie. Until 1998 the owner of Chez Denis had a previous business here, Cafe des Amis, the name of which can just be made out above the central arch in the photograph below.

Red Lion St Orford Yard former stables [7536] 1998-03-10.jpg

Former stables 1998, Orford Yard (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

By 1840 Norwich’s weaving industry had been in decline for some years. Its hand-loom weavers were unable to compete with the steam-powered mills of the north whose better transport and production of popular cotton goods affected the sale of Norfolk’s more traditional worsteds [1]. As a consequence the shoe industry, which had been active for centuries, assumed a more dominant role. In the middle of the C20th there were about thirty boot and shoe manufacturers in Norwich that, together with allied trades, employed over 10,000 people. Now there is only one major shoe-maker, Van-Dal. This wall is all that remains of the Co-op Shoe Factory in Mountergate, and was only allowed to remain “as a baffle against traffic noise for Parmentergate Court” [2]. Coop factory.jpg

Above the gate, the last vestige of ‘Norwich Cooperative Industrial Society Limited’?

While the grander C19th public buildings tended to adhere to the binary choice between Classical or (particularly in the north of England) Gothic styles, the popularity of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition introduced a further option. Cast-iron was cheap and strong and, being able to support large expanses of glass on thin glazing bars, opened up new possibilities in which brick and stone were no longer the major players. In 1863, Holmes and Sons – who manufactured and sold agricultural machinery – built this showroom on Rose Lane. Now it is known as Crystal House and home to Warings furniture store.

The elegant facade of Crystal House (1863) – a great favourite of mine.

Haldinstein’s began making shoes in the early C19th and up until the early 1960s their Boot and Shoe Manufactory occupied seven blocks of buildings between Queen Street and Princes Street [1, 1a]. In the 1930s the firm went into partnership with the Swiss shoe company Bally but by the time shoe production stopped in 1999 only Bally remained [1]. The building at 2-4 Queen Street was renamed Seebohm House and now contains several businesses. The factory is dated ‘1872’ on the rain heads and, like Edward Boardman’s Colegate shoe factory of the same period (1876, see further below), is distinctly ‘modern’ and quite unlike Gothic Revival buildings of that period. However, the building does not appear to have been listed as one of Boardman’s despite his offices being only a few yards further down Queen Street in Old Bank of England Court.

The last remnant of the Haldinstein and Bally factory at 2-4 Queen Street

While the upper floors appear to look forward to C20th modernism – rejecting Neo-Gothic and Classical motifs – the appearance of the Gothic arch at the entrance is confusing and backward looking. The door grille, on the other hand, appears to anticipate the Art Deco period. Seebohm House2.jpg

Clarification lies in the Norfolk Record Office whose files reveal that Boardman did design the Haldinstein building. His original plan shows that the doorway shared the same shallow (and decidedly non-Gothic) arch as the ground and first floor windows. The files also contain other plans by the Boardman practice, dated June 18th 1946, for “Proposed Alteration to Ground Floor”. These relate to a reorganisation of rooms but since this was the year that George Haldinstein sold his 51% share to Bally [1] it strongly suggests that the Gothic entrance was a post-war addition as was the ground floor’s patterned stucco .

Boardman’s plan for Haldinstein’s Queen Street factory, with Philip Haldinstein’s signature over the sixpenny stamp. Note the original door and its surround. (c) Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/23/10/1-43

In 1870, Foster’s Elementary Education Act decreed that towns would build Board Schools in which the teaching of religion was to be strictly regulated [3]. Funded by the local rates these were amongst the first public institutions to be open to both sexes. Thousands of such schools were built throughout the country. For Norwich’s own Board School in Duke Street, JH Brown designed a Higher Grade School that was opened in 1888. It was built by J Youngs and Sons (now a part of the RG Carter Group).

The Norwich Board School in Duke Street with the city’s coat of arms to the left, surmounting “Literature, Science and Art”.

Probably following London’s influential board schools the Duke Street school was built in the contemporary and progressive Queen Anne Revival style (see previous post). The school therefore has the Flemish, high-gabled silhouette with small-paned upper lights and tall casement windows typical of many of this country’s schools [3]. Recently, the building was extensively refurbished by the Norwich University of the Arts – not a major leap from its original purpose but a reflection of current trends in higher education. Duke St School.jpg

Counterbalancing the image of the Victorians’ high moral purpose is the former skating rink in Bethel Street, where fun could be had by gaslight. Built as a roller-skating rink in 1876 it was then used for ten years (1882-1892) by the Salvation Army as their Citadel (see previous blog). The Citadel was entered from St Giles Street via the iron gates adjacent to the Army’s present building that was once Mortimer’s Hotel. I remember the skating rink towards the end of its 100 year occupancy by Lacey and Lincoln, builders’ merchants, before it was refurbished by the present owners in the 1980s. Now, Country and Eastern (below) is a spectacular eastern bazaar that – reflecting the owners’ interest in oriental culture – also contains a small museum of South Asian arts and crafts.

country and eastern.jpg

This factory-like building in St George’s Street was constructed in 1914 as premises for Guntons builders’ and plumbers’ merchants. At one time it was owned by Gunton and Havers – the latter being a relative of the actor Nigel Havers. Now the Gunton Building is another addition to the Norwich’s expanding University of the Arts. Guntons Building.jpg

The Gunton & Havers building in St Georges Street, Norwich 25th March 1967 (c) Archant/EDP Library

St Giles House (41-45 St Giles Street) – one of George Skipper’s big, Baroque and slightly overblown buildings – should dominate the street but it is set parallel to the road and difficult for the passerby to see face-on. It was built in 1904-6 for the Norwich and London Accident Insurance Association just after the opening of another of Skipper’s projects, Surrey House, for rivals Norwich Union: in fact, it has been described as “the Norwich Union in miniature” [4]. Its first rebirth was as a telephone exchange and is sometimes referred to as Telephone House. George Plunkett described it as “Municipal offices until 1938. Education and Treasurer’s departments.” Now it is a luxury hotel, St Giles House. St Giles Hotel.jpg

In 1770-5, the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital was built just outside St Stephen’s Gate by the architect William Ivory. However, the facade of the old hospital that we see today was the result of Edward Boardman’s makeover a century later. His pedimented Dutch gables and rather municipal clock tower do make it look like a town hall [4]. In 2001 a new hospital was built in the suburb of Colney and the old hospital was converted to apartments. NN hospital.jpg

Another building designed by Boardman architects (father EB and son ETB) was for the Norwich Electric Light Company. In 1892 they converted the old Duke’s Palace Ironworks to a site where coal-fired boilers generated electricity that, by 1913, lit over 1750 street lamps around the city. Only 13 years later, superseded by the power station at Thorpe, the over-worked Duke Street site was converted to offices [5]. Now the offices are used by car-sharing company Liftshare. Duke St electric offices2.jpg

The offices of the electricity works are dated 1913. Norwich City’s coat of arms is above the door.

Duke St 4 Electricity works floodlit [1633] 1937-05-13.jpg

Decorations on the floodlit electricity works celebrating the coronation of George VI (1937) (c) George Plunkett

Prolific Boardman had more effect on the appearance of Norwich than perhaps any other architect. His name lives on in Boardman House – the Church Rooms he designed along with the Congregational Chapel in 1879. In 2015 this building in Princes Street was imaginatively refurbished by Norwich University of the Arts to house the School of Architecture. Church Rooms.jpg

Boardman House, interior. 2016.

In the latter part of the C19th Edward Boardman spearheaded Norwich’s expansion, from church rooms to factories – the very diversity of his projects underlining “his aesthetic flexibility”[6]. Howlett and White’s shoe factory (later the Norvic Shoe Co Ltd) became the largest in Britain and between 1876 and 1909 Boardman & Son designed various additions for the expanding enterprise [1]. By the 1930s Norvic occupied virtually all of the land from the river to Colegate and from Duke Street to St George’s Street. But in 1981 the business was in receivership after being asset-stripped of its shops after a takeover in the 1970s [1]. Now the former factory contains offices, apartments, The Last Winebar (a punning reference to its previous incarnation) and, since 2014, The Jane Austen Free School.

Part of Howlett & White’s ‘Norvic’ shoe factory. Edward Boardman designed right of the tower in 1876 and left in 1895.

In the face of competition from mills in the north of England, the mayor Samuel Bignold (son of the founder of Norwich Union) tried to bolster Norwich’s textile trade by establishing the Norwich Yarn Company. The company’s plaque – dated 1839 – can just be seen below the dome of St James’ Mill, built on the site of a C13th Carmelite monastery. Norwich Yarn Co.jpg

Ian Nairn of The Observer, who could be fierce in his architectural reviews, loved this building and called it “the noblest of all English Industrial Revolution Mills” [4]. Its engine-powered looms were not, however, sufficient to avert the threat to Norwich weaving. St James’ Mill was subsequently used by the chocolate manufacturers Caley’s and, until a few years ago, as Jarrold’s Printing Works. Currently, the mill houses private offices. Visit the John Jarrold Printing Museum,which is situated in a riverside building behind St James Mill. Jarrolds Mill.jpg

As a county town Norwich benefitted considerably from the agricultural wealth of the surrounding countryside for which it was the trading centre. In 1882 this was recognised in the inauguration of the Norfolk and Norwich Agricultural Hall, designed for once by an architect other than Edward Boardman: JB Pearce. The opening ceremony was performed by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) as Patron of the wonderfully named Norfolk and Norwich Fat Cattle Show Association [7]. It is not recorded what the cattlemen thought of Oscar Wilde’s lecture on “The House Beautiful”given at the Hall some two years later. The building now houses Anglia TV’s offices and studios. Agriclrl Hall.jpg

Pearce’s sombre public building is made of local red brick faced with a deep red and alien Cumberland sandstone [4]. Further decoration is provided by moulded Cosseyware (see previous post) from Guntons’ brickyard in nearby Costessey. The keystones above the ground floor doors and windows are decorated with heads or emblems. The Prince of Wales feathers refer not only to the prince himself but to the adjoining Prince of Wales road that connects Thorpe railway station with the former cattle market on Castle Hill. One of several heads is shown below; it is evidently a portrait but the identities of these agricultural worthies are no longer known. The reference to the bull’s head seems more straightforward but since JJ Colman was Vice-Chairman of the Agricultural Hall Company might this also allude to what had been Colman’s trademark since 1855? [8].

Sources

Holmes, Frances and Holmes, Michael (2013). The Story of the Norwich Boot and Shoe Trade. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects http://www.norwich-heritage.co.uk Ref 1a: Burgess, Edward and Wilfred (1904). Men Who Have Made Norwich.
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/Industrial%20Architecture/Mountergate%20Coop%20shoe%20factory%20wall%20[7530]%201998-03-01.jpg
Girouard, Marc (1984). Sweetness and Light: “Queen Anne” Movement, 1860-1900. Yale University Press.
Pevsner, Nikolaus and Wilson, Bill (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1. Yale University Press.
http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk/record-details?MNF61834-Duke’s-Palace-Ironworks-and-Norwich-Electric-Lighting-Company&Index=53786&RecordCount=56542&SessionID=071f84aa-3266-4621-85cc-d97a40c30c46
http://hbsmrgateway2.esdm.co.uk/norfolk/DataFiles/Docs/AssocDoc6824.pdf
http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/industrial-innovation/agricultural-hall.htm
http://www.mustardshopnorwich.co.uk/history-of-colmans-pgid15.html

Thanks. For permission to reproduce images I thank Jonathan Plunkett from the Plunkett archive; to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk and to Siofra Connor of the Archant/EDP Library. I am also grateful to Frances Holmes, Philip Tolley and Diana Smith for their assistance.

Fancy bricks

05 Thursday May 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Arts and Crafts, Decorative Arts

≈ 37 Comments

Tags

Arts and Crafts Movement, bricks, Cosseyware, Edward Boardman, George Skipper, Gothic revival, Norwich buildings

The look of a place

Until the coming of the railways in the mid C19th, towns were necessarily made from the materials around them. The honey-coloured villages of the Cotswolds look so right in their environment for even the stone roof-tiles topping the honey-coloured stone walls derive from the bedrock on which they stand. But as we know, Norwich is about as far from decent building stone as you can get. Only the Church and rich grandees could afford to import building stone by water; famously, the Normans built Norwich cathedral of stone shipped from Normandy. So between the age of the medieval timber-framed building and the arrival of steel-reinforced concrete the majority of the city’s buildings were made from clay in the form of brick and tiles. This post focuses on decorative brickwork, produced by one family, that characterised Victorian building in Norwich.

Norwich roofscape from St Giles car park

Around 1860, Norfolk contained 114 brickyards spread throughout the county so though Norfolk may have lacked stone there was evidently no shortage of brick clay [1]. In the pre-railway age, bricks tended to be made close to the building site due to the difficulty of transporting heavy loads over long distances. The arrival of railways in Norwich in the 1840s allowed building materials, such as Welsh slate, to be transported more easily and this, combined with the repeal of the tax on bricks in 1850 [2], contributed to the explosion of terraced-house building in Norwich [3]. Surrounding Norwich were the brickyards of Banham, Lakenham, Reedham, Rockland St Mary, Surlingham and Welborne [1] but the one that perhaps had the greatest effect on Norwich via its red or white decorative products was the Costessey Brickyard five miles to the west, run by the Gunton family.

Gunton Brickyard, Costessey Nr Norwich. (c) Ordnance Survey 1882. Image source, Norfolk Heritage Centre

Many years ago I saw comedian Ken Dodd at the Theatre Royal Norwich. Part of his introductory schtick was to play with local names, pronouncing Happisburgh as Happy’s berg instead of Hay’s bruh and Costessey as three-syllabled Coss-tess-ee instead of Cossey. How we laughed. Anticipating Doddy’s difficulties the Gunton family, who managed the Costessey Brickyard from the 1830s to 1915, called their range of ornamental bricks ‘Cosseyware’. As the map shows, it was quite a large enterprise, employing 40 men and boys in 1882 [4].

(In an update) Costessey resident Peter Mann wrote in to say he was able to name all the workers at the Costessey brickyard (see footnote at end). Excitingly, he identified James Minns with son John Minns seated on his right. Both were labelled as “Carvers of Norwich”, consistent with census returns giving their occupations as ‘carver’ (or, once for James, ‘sculptor’). The entry for Minns on the Mapping of Sculpture website gives his full name as James Benjamin Shingles Minns (ca 1828-1904). James was sufficiently confident of his skill to submit (successfully) a carved wooden panel of ‘A Happy Family’ to the 1897 Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy; he had also carved the mantelpiece and panelling for Thomas Jeckyll’s commission for the Old Library at Carrow Abbey (1860-1). The presence of this highly skilled sculptor and his son at the Costessey Brickyard strongly suggests they were responsible for the ornate ‘fancy’ bricks and panels for which Guntons were locally renowned. From his independent status as ‘Carver’ it seems possible that “James Minns of Heigham” might have been freelance rather than a full-time employee, especially since his address was ca. five miles away from the Costessey Brickyard. [For more on Minns see the ‘Angels in Tights’ post].

Minns@Guntons.jpg

Employees of the Guntons Brickyard Costessey. James Minns is arrowed (white) with his son John, arrowed red. Pre-1904. (c) Ernest Gage Collection at Costessey Town Council. The key to the workers can be seen in the footnote at the end.

Other yards made decorative bricks in Norfolk during the Victorian heyday but Costessey Brickyard became pre-eminent through its association with Costessey Hall. In 1824, when Sir George William Jerningham became the 7th Baronet Stafford, his “commanding and forceful”[4] wife became dissatisfied with the old Tudor hall at Costessey and so began an overambitious plan to build an elaborate, battlemented, pseudo-Tudor replacement. Designed by John Chessel Buckler, Costessey Hall was to be “the richest Gothic building in England” [quoted in 6] but it became a folly that was never fully completed [4]. The fortunes of the Guntons coincided with the rise and fall of the Hall.

Costessey Hall 1870, architect John Chessell Buckler. Source: RIBA Collections

Costessey Hall showing Tudor Revival chimneys made at the Gunton Brickyard. Source: Picture Norfolk and Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell

Gunton Bros catalogue 1907. Source: Norfolk Heritage Centre

In 1862, the owner of Costessey Hall, Sir Henry Valentine Stafford Jerningham, who had produced no heir, asked the wonderfully-named Masters of Lunacy to declare the next in line (his nephew The Right Hon. Augustus Frederick FitzHerbert Stafford Jerningham) to be of unsound mind [5]. When nephew Augustus inherited the estate in 1884 the Lunacy Commissioners suggested the Hall was not suitable for him and that it be closed up. But Norwich’s foremost architect Edward Boardman argued against closure, marking an early connection between him and Costessey. On Augustus’ death his brother, Sir FitzOsbert Edward Stafford Jerningham, inherited to become the last Baron Stafford to live at the Hall. He was described as an eccentric who, mindful of what had happened to his brother, kept his back to the wall (literally) and refused to leave the confines of the estate [4]. After his death the estate was seen as a white elephant to his inheritors, leading to the long drawn out demolition of the Hall.

Demolition of Costessey Hall began in 1920; seen here in 1934 (c) www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

Tastes had already begun to change some years before the demolition of the Hall. During the second half of the C19th one of the styles within the all-embracing Arts and Crafts Movement was for decorative “Gothick” brickwork (usually red) of the kind that the Guntons had made first for Costessey Hall then for the wider public. However, this fascination for Tudorbethan brick was in decline by the turn of the C20th and in 1915 the Guntons failed to renew their lease at Costessey. All that remains of the Hall is the Belfry Block off the eighteenth fairway at Costessey Park Golf Club. And all that remains (reportedly) of the Brickyard is a derelict kiln at the end of Brickfield Loke.

Brickfield Loke.jpg

The family continued making ordinary bricks (known as ‘builders’) at their Barney, Little Plumstead and Runton works but these outposts closed in 1939 due to fears that the kilns could act as beacons to enemy planes.

Stoking the furnace to burn bricks, probably at Gunton’s yard at Barney. Source: Ernest Gage Collection at Costessey Town Council.

After the main phase of building the Hall, George Gunton began to look for alternative outlets for his decorative bricks; their widespread dispersal was greatly assisted by the 1850 repeal of the brick tax – a tax that had been particularly punitive for oversize decorative bricks [6]. Cosseyware began to increase in popularity, first under George Gunton then from 1868 under his sons William and George. It was therefore during the second half of the C19th that Costessey clay started to have an impact upon the appearance of the city.

At the back of the Old Red Lion Beerhouse at 64 Costessey West End, George Gunton built an outhouse. Local historian Paul Cooper told me: “The Red Lion outbuildings would have been a showroom and where they did the intricate carving on the chimneys and fireplaces.”

Cossy bricks on bldg west end_@BridewellPicNorflk.jpg

Cosseyware letter bricks spell out the name of George Gunton. Bricks like these can be spotted throughout Norwich. Source: ‘Picture Norfolk‘ and Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell.

The same gable end in 2016, minus doorways. Note the Cosseyware chimney.

Cosseyware chimneys in Costessey West End 2016. Left: grapevine pattern; right: ‘patriotic’ rose/shamrock/thistle bricks on the building shown in the previous image.

The GG tiles beneath the grapevine-patterned chimney on the left suggest this is one of the nine houses that George Gunton is known to have built between 1850-1860 [6] in West End, not far from the brickyard.

Letter and number bricks, identical to those at Costessey West End, on the gable end of a house at the junction of Belvoir and Earlham Roads, Norwich

Aucuba Villas (1896) on Earlham Road, Norwich. [Aucuba is an evergreen shrub]. Note the characteristic Gunton ‘A’ in all these examples.

... and again at Park Lane, Norwich

The rose bricks above the ‘Adelaide Villa’ lettering were still to be found in the Gunton Bros 1903 catalogue

The same bricks from the ‘patriotic’ range (but no leek!) were incorporated into many of the walls and features of the Plantation Garden, Norwich.

In the mid 1850s, Henry Trevor created The Plantation Garden near St John’s Cathedral on Earlham Road in an old chalk and flint mine. It is a Victorian delight, benefitting from years of careful restoration. If you want to see a range of Gunton’s products look no further: fragments from more than 15 of their 34 patterns on chimneys can be identified here [7]. Plantn garden_2.jpg

The Plantation Garden’s fountain (1857) with its characteristic mixture of flint and ornamental Cosseyware

Curfew Terrace_a.jpg

Not far from the Plantation Garden this plaque can be found on Earlham Road near the junction with Park Lane.

Two of Norwich’s foremost architects, Edward Boardman and George Skipper, used Cosseyware to ornament their buildings – a choice that helped define the appearance of the Victorian city. In 1869, Boardman designed the Princes Street Congregational Chapel (now United Reformed Church) and adjoining Church Rooms in an Italianate style.

United Refd Church.jpg

Boardman’s Congregational Chapel, with triangular pediment, is seen beyond the Church Rooms that he also designed. The Rooms have been renamed Boardman House and are now part of Norwich University of the Arts.

Gunton’s white decorative wares were used to realise the classical Italian style

Pale brick from Gunton’s was used again by Boardman for his office block, Castle Chambers, in Opie Street off Castle Meadow.

Castle Chambers 1877. Architect Edward Boardman

Some 20 years later Boardman was to design the Royal Hotel around the corner on Agricultural Hall Plain in red brick and ornamental Cosseyware. This hotel replaced the old Royal Hotel that provided the site for Skipper’s Royal Arcade off the marketplace.

Royal Hotel, Norwich (1896-7). Architect Edward Boardman

The Arts and Crafts Movement roamed widely for its pre-industrial architectural influences: the Royal Hotel is described as being “free Flemish” [8]. The lower levels are relatively plain but further up the stylistic tics of neo-Renaissance architecture become more apparent in the ornamented string courses, gables and pinnacles – all richly decorated in Cosseyware.

Royal Hotel detail_2.jpg

The diamond shapes in the triangle at the centre of the gable above form a repetitive pattern or diaper that can be seen on several buildings around Norwich

The former carriage entrance of The Green House 42-46 Bethel Street offers a fine example of Gunton’s diapering …

Bethel St.jpg

Boardman used red Cosseyware diapering on his own offices in Old Bank of England Court, Queen Street. His nameplate, which is a gem of Victorian lettering, was custom made rather then being made from Gunton’s individual letter bricks. edward boardman_1.jpg

Gunton’s red clay was used to make these intricate tableaux on what were once George Skipper’s offices, now subsumed into Jarrold’s department store on London Street.

Arts and Crafts: Skipper is showing clients the Art of architecture while workmen demonstrate the various Crafts of building

In this other Cosseyware panel, Skipper introduces his work to potential clients. In the background are three of his completed Norwich buildings [9]. Now that we know what James Minns, the carver, looked like it is highly likely that top-hatted Skipper is pointing to a shield held by Minns who worked on several joint projects.

Glance right next time you exit Norwich Rail Station and you will see one of the most richly decorated buildings in Norwich – 22 Thorpe Road . It was designed ca. 1900 by A F Scott and Son [6] using red Cosseyware in Franco-Flemish neo-Renaissance style.

Bewick House, 22 Thorpe Road, headquarters of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust

The moulding is still crisp after more than 100 years

Buildings in the last quarter of the C19th buildings were often exuberantly marked with terracotta date plaques – perhaps an expression of the confidence felt by Victorian architects and their clients at the height of Empire. This example below is over one metre tall:

13 Ipswich Rd Norwich.jpg

1878. Number 13 Ipswich Road

1875. Edward Boardman’s office in Old Bank of England Court

1877. Boardman’s Castle Chambers, Opie Street, Norwich

1894. Number 22 Thorpe Road

1886. Norwich Gaol, Mousehold Heath

1888. St Ethelbert’s House, Tombland, Norwich

From terraced houses to large public buildings, Cosseyware left its distinctive mark on Victorian Norwich.

Sources

Lucas, Robin (1993). Brickmaking. In, An Historical Atlas of Norfolk. pp154-155.
Lucas, Robin (1997). The tax on bricks and tiles, 1784-1850: its application to the country at large and, in particular,to the county of Norfolk. Construction History vol 13, pp29-55.
O’Donoghue, Rosemary (2014). Norwich, an expanding city 1801-1900. Larks Press, Dereham.
Gage, Ernest G. (1991). Costessey Hall. A retrospect of the Jernegans, Jerninghams and Stafford Jerninghams of Costessey Hall, Norfolk. Available from: http://www.costesseybooks.co.uk/purchasebooks.htm
Gage, Ernest, G. (2013). Costessey: A Look into the Past. Pub: Brian Gage, 31 Eastern Ave, Norwich NR7 OUQ (also, see preceding link).
Lucas, Robin (1997). Neo-Gothic, Neo-Tudor, Neo-Renaissance: The Costessey Brickyard. The Victorian Society Journal pp 25-37.
Adam, Sheila (2009). The Plantation Garden Norwich: A History and Guide. (Available from the Plantation Garden, 4 Earlham Road, Norwich).
Pevsner, Nikolaus and Wilson, Bill (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Yale University Press.
Bussey, David and Martin, Eleanor (2012). The Architects of Norwich. George Skipper, 1856-1948. The Norwich Society.

Visit: the excellent website with many photographs of Costessey Hall and of brick-making on: http://www.costesseybooks.co.uk/contact.htm. I am grateful to Brian Gage for generously providing information and access to the Ernest Gage Collection. Thanks are also due to Paul Cooper, local historian, for sharing his extensive knowledge of Costessey Hall and the Gunton Brickyard. I am grateful to Peter Mann for naming the Costessey workers.

Visit: www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk. An endlessly fascinating archive of photographs of old Norfolk with a great series of photographs of old Costessey Hall. Thanks to Clare Everitt, who runs the website, for her help.

Visit: if you haven’t already seen the Plantation Garden you are in for a treat. Open daily 9.00am – dusk. Their excellent website is well worth exploring (http://plantationgarden.co.uk).

Footnote: Peter Mann mailed in to provide the names of men in the photograph of the Gunton workers. He says: “My Grandfather and Great Grandfather are included in the Picture. Names as follows:
Back Row L/R, Albert White, John Ireson, Charles Doggett, George Gunton (Part Owner), Walter Ireson, James Simmons.
Middle Row L/R, Daniel Drury, William Gunton Jnr, Fred Barber, William Gunton Snr (Part Owner), Noah Mansfield, H.E Gunton, Charles Gotts, Thomas Mann Jnr. Seated Row, Arthur Paul (kneeling), John Minns, James Minns, (Carvers Of Norwich), Joseph Goward, Thomas Mann Snr.
Bottom Row, Robert Burton, James Paul, William Bugdale, Harry Banham.”

Skipper’s Art Nouveau Building

12 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Art, Arts and Crafts, Decorative Arts

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

AH MAckmurdo, Art Nouveau, Doulton tiles, Edward Everard, George Skipper, Norfolk Daily Standard, Royal Arcade Norwich, WJ Neatby

Art nouveau (the new art), le style moderne, Jugendstil (youth style), Secessionism, all refer to the newness of an art that, around 1900, broke away from academic tradition and – in some versions – emphasised the curved line of plant form. But this sensuous, rather decadent, style with its characteristic whiplash line might have had its origins in religious architecture.

Six hundred years earlier the curved line was being used to design the stone tracery decorating the tops of Gothic windows. Instead of scribing complete circles with his compass to produce, for example, the clover-leaf trefoils of the earlier Geometric phase, the master mason of the Curvilinear period would join separate arcs to produce the sinuous S-shape of the ogee [1]. Nikolaus Pevsner described this window below as, “The best Decorated example in Norfolk” [2].

The curvilinear tracery of St Mary Snettisham, Norfolk. Photo: Spencer Means, Creative Commons

Compared to the sinuous line of the English Curvilinear period the continental version seems even more convoluted, reflexing back on itself to produce the flame-like curves of the Flamboyant period.

Flamboyant window in Milan Cathedral. Photo: Mary Ann Sullivan

The reversed curve may therefore have been deeply embedded in the architectural folk memory and, in Britain at least, reawakened by the Victorian Gothic Revival. However, the first time that the flexuous line emerged as a recognisably art nouveau design was when this book cover by the English designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo was published in 1883. It was, said Pevsner, “the first work of art nouveau which can be traced” [3].

Book cover for Wren’s City Churches by A. H. Mackmurdo 1883.

Norfolk readers may appreciate Mackmurdo’s early Art Nouveau ‘Cromer Bird’ pattern, which used a similar undulating line.

cromer bird.jpg

A.H.Mackmurdo 1884. ‘Cromer Bird’ design for block-printed cotton.

In medieval Gothic architecture even the most curvaceous designs of the Curvilinear period remained symmetrical: either radially symmetrical (as in the second figure above) or with left/right bilateral symmetry as in the first example of a Decorated window. But in designing this chair-back Mackmurdo resisted the urge for symmetry.

Mackmurdo chair of 1883-4. The seat and legs are entirely conventional but the fretwork splat is wonderfully asymmetrical – almost a 3D version of the ‘Wren’ book cover above.

The ‘Wren’ book cover might imply that Art Nouveau originated in Britain but in reality the new art was an amalgam of styles that emerged at about the same time across Europe and America. However, Art Nouveau never fully emerged as a dominant architectural style here, perhaps being thought too decadent and sensuous for Protestant Britain. The major exception was in Glasgow where Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s buildings are masterpieces of a new style, although his version was more rectilinear and geometric than these snaking lines displayed in Victor Horta’s Hotel Tassel, Brussels.

Hotel Tassel, designed by Victor Horta, Brussels 1893-4.

Compared to the pent up energy of the whiplash line unleashed in continental architecture the rare examples of Art Nouveau buildings in England appear restrained.

The Royal Arcade in Norwich is a nationally important example…

Royal Arcade Norwich 1899. Architect GJ Skipper, designer WJ Neatby of Doulton Lambeth Pottery

The photograph below, taken in 1955, shows the ground floor of the shop that flanked the left entrance to the arcade.

The Royal Arcade 1955 (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

This shop to the left of the Back of the Inns entrance was known as The Arcade Stores. Originally a Bullards pub, Skipper integrated it into the arcade. Below, we can just make out tiles bearing bunches of grapes (left) but they didn’t survive the destruction of this part of the building when converted to a butcher’s shop in the 1960s (see oldcity.org.uk).

The Arcade Stores 1956. (c) RIBA

Another jewel-like building with polychrome Doulton tiles by the same designer is the Edward Everard printing works in Bristol.

Everard’s printing press Bristol, with tiles by Doulton’s WJ Neatby. Only the facade survives, underlining the relative importance attached to exterior versus the interior (c) RIBA

Both built at about 1900, Everard’s and the Royal Arcade share obvious similarities derived from the Doulton tile designer William James Neatby. The figure to the left of the first floor windows of the printing works is the inventor of the printing press Johannes Gutenberg: to the right is William Morris who revived the art of printing with his Kelmscott Press. This in turn has resonances with another building by George Skipper in Norwich, The Norfolk Daily Standard offices in St Giles Street.

Norfolk Daily Standard offices (1899-1900), architect George Skipper.

This Skipper gem is decorated with Doulton brown terracotta tiles. Although there are minor Art Nouveau touches it is not really an example of that movement for its influences are more eclectic [4]. But, recalling those two figures of pioneers on the Everard building (and the tendency of architects to borrow a good idea), the Norfolk Daily Standard building bears portraits of William Caxton (the first English printer) and Daniel Defoe (one of the first English journalists and novelists).

William Caxton (printer) and Daniel Defoe (writer) decorate the Norfolk Daily Standard building.

These newspaper offices and the Royal Arcade are prime examples of Skipper’s imaginative buildings, designed about 1900, that brought a modern dimension to the largely medieval and Georgian-style city. As Sir John Betjeman said:

“He was to Norwich what Gaudi was to Barcelona”

Betjeman probably had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he compared Norwich and Barcelona but, don’t forget, Skipper was big in Cromer too. [5]

It was Neatby’s colourful tiles rather than the underlying architecture that caused the press to say the arcade was like a “fragment from the Arabian Nights dropped into the heart of the old city” [6]. At that stage, Neatby had been Head of Doulton’s architectural department for about ten years.

Sir Henry Doulton (d 1897) made his money from the manufacture of glazed stoneware drainage pipes at a time when there was an increasing demand for better sanitation. By 1870 the same clay used for sewage pipes was being used by students who came to his workshop from the nearby Lambeth School of Art to produce what became the enormously popular Doulton Art Pottery.

Left, A Doulton slip-cast stoneware vase in which the pattern is applied by the mould. Centre, a Doulton stoneware vase that has been turned on a wheel with the pattern applied by hand. Right, a transfer-printed, hand-painted vase (factory unknown) showing the more continental whiplash line.

Neatby was an experimentalist and he helped develop Doulton’s Carraraware, a dense white body made to look like marble [7] that was used to clad the external facing of the Royal Arcade.

This winged angel guarding the east entrance to the Royal Arcade is a reference to the Angel Inn that once stood on this site [4].

The interior was decorated with another product – a matt material called Parian ware, which was also developed by Neatby [7].

Neatby peacock.jpg

Neatby’s side entrance to the arcade – Parian ware with a raised sinuous line.

Some particularly attractive tiles are found in the spandrels of the central arches. These panels depict a young woman holding a circle that, in original illustrations, contained a sign of the zodiac [7].

Neatby_female figure_1.jpg

Neatby’s working cartoon for the Royal Arcade tiles. From the Proceedings of the Society of Designers c1900.[8]

The image is strongly reminiscent of the women illustrated by Alphonse Mucha in his lithographic posters; for instance Salome (below), published two years before the Royal Arcade was opened. Mucha’s free-hand drawings for his lithographs use a detailed, sinuous line but Neatby’s freedom was restricted by his medium: he had to pour enamel glazes into indentations impressed into the mould as it was formed [8]. An early article noted, “Everyone knows that enamel painting on pottery is not so ‘go as you please’ as oil or watercolour painting … the actual technique (is) exceedingly difficult” [9].

‘Salome’ by Alphonse Mucha, 1897 (c) backtoclassics.com

Postscript

Many years ago I bought a framed tile in a junk shop in Cambridge. The buff-coloured sanitary-ware tile, impressed with ‘Doulton’, was illustrated with the head of a young woman. Much later I realised she was based on Mucha’s Salome, but flipped left/right.

Mucha_like tile_1.jpg

Sources

Harvey, John (1988). Cathedrals of England and Wales. Pub, Batsford Ltd, London.
Pevsner, Nikolaus and Wilson, Bill (1999). The Buildings of England, Norfolk vol 2. Pub, Yale University Press.
Pevsner, Nikolaus (1975). Pioneers of Modern Design. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Bussey, David and Martin, Eleanor. (2012). The Architects of Norwich: George John Skipper, 1856-1948. Pub, The Norwich Society.
Hitchings, Glenys (2015).George John Skipper (1856-1948). The Man who created Cromer’s Skyline. Pub, Iceni Print and Products. [Available from City Bookshop Norwich http://www.citybookshopnorwich.co.uk]
Salt, Rosemary. (1988). Plans for a Fine City (Victorian Society East Anglian Group, Norwich).
Atterbury, Paul and Irvine, Louise (1979). The Doulton Story. A souvenir booklet produced originally for the exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum London 30 May- 12 August 1979.
http://tilesoc.org.uk/tile-gazetteer/norfolk.html
https://www.fulltable.com/vts/aoi/n/neatby/a.htm

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Tag Archives: George Skipper

Plans for a Fine City

Norwich Department Stores

Twentieth Century Norwich Buildings

James Minns, carver

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“The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” (Cicero)

The flamboyant Mr Skipper

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Skipper’s Art Nouveau Building

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